He was a teacher of some renown at both the London School of Economics and the University of Sussex, where he served as the founding Dean of European Studies.

[6] His work, along with that of the Australian philosopher John Anderson, was a lasting influence upon the thought of Hedley Bull, author of one of the most widely read texts on the nature of international politics, The Anarchical Society (1977).

Two years later, however, his position at the school became untenable: having been called up for military service, Wight chose to register as a conscientious objector, and one condition of the tribunal's acceptance of his application was that he ceased to teach.

At the behest of Margery Perham, he returned to Oxford to work, for the remainder of the Second World War, on an extended research project on colonial constitutions.

In 1946, Wight was recruited by David Astor, then editor of The Observer to act as the newspaper's diplomatic correspondent at the inaugural sessions of the United Nations at Lake Success.

In 1947, Wight went back again at Chatham House, collaborating with Toynbee on the production of the Surveys of International Affairs covering the war-years and contributing to his A Study of History.

[9] In 1959, Wight was invited by the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield to join the British committee on the theory of international politics, a group initially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

His teaching at the LSE in the 1950s is often seen to have been a strong influence on the direction of international studies in Britain; his posthumously published essays have clearly served as a major stimulus to the revival of the 'English school' in the 1990s.