Thomas J. Biersteker

Biography

Thomas Biersteker is Gasteyger Professor of International Security and Director of Policy Research at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. He previously directed the Graduate Institute's Programme for the Study of International Governance, the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and has also taught at Yale University and the University of Southern California. He is the author/editor of ten books, including State Sovereignty as Social Construct (1996), The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (2002), and Targeted Sanctions: The Impacts and Effectiveness of United Nations Action (2016). His current research focuses on targeted sanctions, transnational policy networks in global security governance, and the dialectics of world orders. He was the principal developer of SanctionsApp, a tool for mobile devices created in 2013 to increase access to information about targeted sanctions at the UN. He received his PhD and MS from MIT and his BA from the University of Chicago.

Research Interest

Although many factors influence contemporary international relations, there are good reasons to assume that international relations pedagogy plays an important role in shaping different worldviews and foundational orientations. The purpose of this two year SNSF project is to examine the international relations education curricula in three countries: Russia, Canada and neutral Switzerland, which recently played an instrumental role in mediating the conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine while it chaired the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2014.