About

G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, serving 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 and a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. His research focuses on international relations, American foreign policy, and the development of international order, with notable contributions including his books 'Liberal Leviathan' and 'After Victory.' Ikenberry has been recognized as a top scholar in the field, ranked among the most influential and interesting scholars in international relations over the past two decades. He has authored numerous books, articles, and essays exploring themes such as liberal international order, strategic restraint, and the evolution of global power dynamics. His work often examines the legacy of American leadership, the stability of international institutions, and the future of global order, making him a prominent figure in contemporary international relations scholarship.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Political economy
• Computer Security
• Law and economics
• Economics
• Development economics

Selected publications

• Liberalism, Institutional Statecraft, and International Order

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-01-30

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• List of Contributors

  2025-09-22

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• Making Sense of the 1990s

  2025-09-22

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  Abstract This introductory chapter lays out the volume’s analytic framework and core themes. It starts by looking at the “mixed outcomes” that emerged out of the 1990s. These are the choices, successes, and missed opportunities that the volume’s authors explore and seek to explain. The chapter then introduces the volume’s themes and summarizes the essays that probe them across a variety of geographic and functional settings. The chapter summaries are organized to highlight key features of liberal order-building in the 1990s, as well as areas of agreement and disagreement over what was achieved, and at what cost. The chapter concludes by considering the volume’s implications for understanding the challenges that China, Russia, and the antiglobalist backlash within the West pose to the liberal order today.

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• Preface and Acknowledgments

  2025-09-22

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• What is Modernity?

  OUGHTOPIA · 2025-10-31

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  This article interrogates the meaning and trajectory of modernity as a world- historical transformation. Originating in the Enlightenment and propelled by revolutions in science, technology, and political order, modernity has been conceived as a permanent revolution shaping human capacities, institutions, and global interdependence. Liberal modernity in particular rests on assumptions of humanism, rationality, autonomy, science, and institutional design. Yet its promises of progress are increasingly contested in an era of democratic backsliding, geopolitical rivalry, and environmental crisis. The paper examines the “discovery” of modernity, the global impact of modernization, and the rival visions that have emerged— from progressive narratives of liberal democracy to more modest, contingent, or pluralist accounts. Ultimately, it argues that the viability of liberal modernity depends on recovering optimism about the future as a site for cooperation and institutional innovation. Modernity’s future lies not in inevitable progress but in the capacity of societies to sustain belief in improvement, to rebuild institutions that generate predictability, and to exercise reasoned agency in shaping a shared global condition.

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• Governing the World: Great Powers and the Dilemmas of Inclusion and Exclusion—1815, 1919, 1945, and Today

  2024-01-01 · 1 citations

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• Three Worlds: the West, East and South and the competition to shape global order

  International Affairs · 2024-01-08 · 109 citations

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  Abstract Among the many impacts of Russia's war on Ukraine, the most consequential may be in pushing the world in the direction of Three Worlds—the global West, the global East and the global South. One is led by the United States and Europe, the second by China and Russia, and the third by an amorphous grouping of non-western developing nations. These Three Worlds are not blocs or coherent negotiating groups, but loose, constructed and evolving global factions. This article makes four arguments. First, the Three Worlds system has the makings of a fairly durable pattern of global order, shaping struggles over rules and institutions. Second, the Three Worlds system will encourage a ‘creative’ politics of global order-building. The global West and global East will have incentives to compete for the support and cooperation of the global South. Third, there are deep principles of world order that provide a foundation for the Three Worlds competition. Finally, if the global West is to remain at the center of world order in the decades ahead, it will need to accommodate both the global East and the global South, and adapt itself to a more pluralistic world. But in the competition with the global East for the support of the global South, it has the advantage. The global South's critique of the global West is not that it offers the wrong pathway to modernity, but that it has not lived up to its principles or shared sufficiently the material fruits of liberal modernity.

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• China and Hegemony: An Exchange – The Authors Reply

  Security Studies · 2024-01-01

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  Peer-reviewed

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• Liberal statecraft and the problems of world order

  Oxford Review of Economic Policy · 2024-01-01 · 6 citations

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  Abstract What is the future of the Western-led liberal international order? This paper makes four arguments. First, over the last two centuries, liberal democracies have pioneered a tradition of international order building, the essential impulse of which has been to create an environment—a sort of cooperative ecosystem—in which liberal states can manage interdependence, protect their values and interests, and aggregate capabilities to defend against threats and challenges to their global position and way of life. Second, liberal democracies have used institutions as tools and mechanisms to respond to dangers and opportunities in the global system, focused on the problems of anarchy, hierarchy, interdependence, liberal openness, and geopolitical vulnerability. Third, the most dramatic forms of liberal order building have occurred after major wars, when liberal democracies found themselves in war and geopolitical competition with rival and threatening illiberal great powers. Finally, liberal internationalism and the liberal project still have a future in that they offer cooperative solutions the core problems of twenty-first century world order.

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• Introduction

  2023-03-23 · 3 citations

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  International audience

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Frequent coauthors

• Joanne Gowa

  Cornell University

  118 shared

• Michael Mastanduno

  100 shared

• Charles A. Kupchan

  98 shared

• Bruce Bueno

  93 shared

• Robert O. Keohane

  University of Oxford

  87 shared

• Laura D’Andrea Tyson

  85 shared

• Peter Gilpin

  Dartmouth College

  85 shared

• Mark W. Zacher

  85 shared

Labs

• G. John Ikenberry LabPI

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences