Book Talk: A World Safe for Democracy by John Ikenberry
For two hundred years, the grand project of liberal internationalism has been to build a world order that is open, loosely rules-based, and oriented toward progressive ideas. Today this project is in crisis, threatened from the outside by illiberal challengers and from the inside by nationalist-populist movements. This timely book offers the first full account of liberal internationalism’s long journey from its nineteenth-century roots to today’s fractured political moment. Creating an international “space” for liberal democracy, preserving rights and protections within and between countries, and balancing conflicting values such as liberty and equality, openness and social solidarity, and sovereignty and interdependence—these are the guiding aims that have propelled liberal internationalism through the upheavals of the past two centuries. G. John Ikenberry argues that in a twenty-first century marked by rising economic and security interdependence, liberal internationalism—reformed and reimagined—remains the most viable project to protect liberal democracy.
Please join us on October 30 at 1:30pm EDT for a discussion with Dr. Ikenberry about his work. The event will be moderated by Professor Daniel Nexon with comments by Professor Stacie Goddard (Wellesley College). Register here to receive the link to the event.
About the Author
G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He is also Co-Director of Princeton’s Center for International Security Studies. Ikenberry is also a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. In 2018-19, Ikenberry was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. In 2013-2014 Ikenberry was the 72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford. Ikenberry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, Ikenberry was ranked 10th in scholars who have produced the best work in the field of IR in the past 20 years, and ranked 8th in scholars who have produced the most interesting work in the past 5 years.
About the Discussants
Daniel Nexon is a Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown University. Professor Nexon’s work covers issues in international-relations theory, American foreign policy, power politics, the politics of religious contention, and the relationship between popular culture and world politics. He has held fellowships at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018. He founded, and used to blog, at The Duck of Minerva. He currently blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Stacie Goddard is the Mildred Kemper Lane Professor of Political Science and Paula Phillips Bernstein Director of the Madeleine K. Albright Institute at Wellesley College. Her work explores great power politics and revisionism within international orders. She is the author of When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order (Cornell University Press 2018) and Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland (Cambridge University Press 2010).