2024/11/01 by Michael Cox · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Nuclear Issues and Defense
paper · doi:10.1093/ia/iiae239
openalex publication_date 2024/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Looking back from our current vantage point, it is difficult to grasp how influential liberal theorists shaped International Relations debates. Realism may have grabbed most of the headlines during the Cold War. However, a powerful and influential body of work ran alongside realism, and sometimes interacted with it. Liberalism proposed a very different way of thinking about the international system, not as some kind of Darwinian struggle for survival, but as a rules-based order in which states cooperated because it was in their interest to do so. Joseph Nye and Michael Doyle are two of the most famous practitioners of liberal international theory, and over the last 50 years they have published numerous books and well-cited articles that cemented their reputation as scholars of the first order. They also opened a door through which others then passed, including most prominently John Ikenberry, whose books set something close to the gold standard for liberal thinking about the world for at least another two decades.