[1] The School was created on the suggestion of the then Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, that there was the need for an institution to help build a pool of academic experts on international affairs and area studies who could give an informed second opinion on India's relations with the world.
[2] The school was inaugurated on 1 October 1955 in the presence of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Vice President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.
Even prior to this action, the School had been in the middle of a controversy in Parliament with a parliamentary committee set up to look into various allegations, in response to an intensive campaign run by various vested interests.
[2] A controversy that followed the merger was the decision to bifurcate the library of the ISIS on the basis of ownership of books, documents and journals.
The bifurcation was done in a bureaucratic style without regard to the wholeness of collections built up over a period of time, leading the last Director of the ISIS, Prof. M.S.