Read the argument behind a public position, how it explains cooperation or conflict, and where it can fall short. Each profile or reading essay names the work it covers and links its sources.
International relations theory and U.S. grand strategy
In his 2019 argument about international order, Mearsheimer links the limits of liberal projects to nationalism and great-power competition. The question is how far a shared order can reach when its political ambitions provoke resistance.
Institutions, interdependence, and global governance
Cooperation need not depend on states becoming altruistic. Keohane asks how governments with competing interests can still make agreements worth keeping. Institutions matter when they change the practical conditions under which those governments bargain.
Constructivist international relations theory
Wendt questions a starting assumption shared by many debates about cooperation: that states arrive with fixed, self-interested identities. His 1994 argument asks whether interaction can change who states understand themselves to be, and therefore what they want.
International political economy and structural power
Strange asks who can shape the conditions within which other people, firms and governments must act. A territorial map of states can miss authority exercised through markets, credit and control of knowledge.
Order among sovereign states
How can states maintain an international order without a world government? Bull examines the rules and practices that make a society of states possible, even when its members compete and sometimes go to war.
Governing shared resources
Shared resources do not always require a choice between state control and private ownership. Ostrom studies how people who depend on the same forests, fisheries or water supplies can sometimes govern them together.
How ideas change as they travel
An idea promoted internationally does not arrive in an empty political landscape. Acharya asks how local actors adapt outside norms to beliefs and practices they already regard as legitimate.
Whose welfare counts
A policy can improve a national total while leaving the poorest people no better off. Sen’s work asks what information we need to judge welfare, poverty and decisions made on behalf of society.