She was the first woman to hold the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and was the first female academic to have a professorship named after her at the LSE.

[4] In 2024, King's College London and the LSE hosted a two-day conference celebrating and debating the continuing relevance of Susan Strange's thinking both in and outside academia.

[10] She served as professor of international political economy at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, from 1989 to 1993.

However, she noted that political scientists also have a woeful understanding of international economics due to their emphasis on institutions and power.

[23] She pointed to the superiority of the American technology sector, dominance in services, and the position of the U.S. dollar as the top international currency as real indicators of lasting power.

[20] Strange's key contribution to IPE was on the issue of power, which she considered essential to the character and dynamics of the global economy.

[3][22] States and Markets (1988) delineates four key forms of power—security, production, finance, and knowledge; power is the ability to "provide protection, make things, obtain access to credit, and develop and control authoritative modes of interpreting the world".

She maintained that the global market, relative to the nation state, had gained significant power since the 1970s and that a "dangerous gap" was emerging between the two.

She considered nation states inflexible, limited by territorial boundaries in a world of fragile intergovernmental co-operation; "Westfailure" is what she called Westphalia.

In Casino Capitalism (Blackwells, 1986), Susan Strange problemizes the nonsystem that the international monetary system has become.

The Smithsonian Agreement has been weak leading further to benign neglect from the US, the Eurodollar market and OPEC has been strong undermining the Bretton Woods system.

[27] In 2024, the British International Studies Association organised an event on Strange's work which "has enjoyed a renaissance recently".

[28] Susan Strange is remembered through the following annual awards: In 1942, she married Denis Merritt (died 1993); they had one son and one daughter, and the marriage was dissolved in 1955.