Description

Alexander Cooley is an associate professor of international relations at Barnard College at Columbia University. His work examines the politics of sovereignty, hierarchy and international patron-client relations, with a regional focus on the states of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Professor Cooley is the author of three books. The first, Logics of Hierarchy:The Organization of Empires, States and Military Occupations (Cornell University Press 2005), examined the enduring legacies of Soviet rule in Central Asia in a comparative post-imperial perspective and was awarded the 2006 Marshall Shulman Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (co-winner) for outstanding book on the international relations of the post-Communist states. In 2009 he published Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations, co-authored with Hendrik Spruyt, which examines the various ways in which states bargain to split and share their sovereign rights.

In addition to his academic work, Professor Cooley has contributed policy-related articles to the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, International Herald Tribune, Current History and Foreign Affairs magazine. Cooley earned both his M.A. (1995) and Ph.D. (1999) from Columbia University and has held fellowships with the Open Society Institute, German Marshall Fund and Smith Richardson Foundation.