Michael W. Doyle is a University Professor of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University, the director of Columbia Global Policy Initiative, and co-director of the Center on Global Governance at Columbia Law School.
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, he was educated in France and Switzerland and received his high school diploma from Jesuit High School, Tampa, Florida. He studied at the U.S. Air Force Academy for two years (and also qualified as a parachutist at Fort Benning) before transferring to Harvard University, where he earned his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. (in Political Science in 1977). As an undergraduate he won the Detur Prize and was named John Harvard Scholar. As a graduate student, he held the Atherton Prize Fellowship and a Resident Tutorship in Government in Leverett House. He completed his military service in the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
Doyle served as a lecturer in international studies at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, from 1975 to 1976. He then went on to work as an assistant professor of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University from 1977 to 1984. He went on to serve as first assistant and then associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University until 1987. He returned to Princeton following his time at Johns Hopkins, ascending from associate professor to professor and the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics and International Affairs by 2003. He previously served as theHarold Brown Professor of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University, before being named a University Professor.
His publications include The Question of Intervention: John Stuart Mill and the Responsibility to Protect; Liberal Peace; Ways of War and Peace; U.N. Peacekeeping in Cambodia: UNTAC’s Civil Mandate; Striking First: Preemption and Prevention in International Conflict (the Tanner Lectures, published by Princeton University Press); Making War and Building Peace, written with Nicholas Sambanis; Alternatives to Monetary Disorder, written with Fred Hirsch and Edward Morse; Keeping the Peace, edited with Ian Johnstone and Robert Orr; Peacemaking and Peacekeeping for the New Century, edited with Clara Otunnu; New Thinking in International Relations Theory, edited with John Ikenberry; and The Globalization of Human Rights, edited with Jean-Marc Colcaud and Anne-Marie Gardner. He has also published numerous articles, chapters in books, and occasional essays including “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs: Parts I and II,” in Philosophy and Public Affairs (1983). He delivered the Tanner Lectures on “Anticipatory Self-Defense” at Princeton University on November 8-9, 2006.
He directed the Center of International Studies at Princeton University and chaired the Editorial Board and the Committee of Editors of World Politics. He was the vice-president and senior fellow of the International Peace Academy and is now a member of its board of directors. He has also served as a member of the External Research Advisory Committee of the UNHCR and the Advisory Committee of the Lessons-Learned Unit of the Department of Peace-Keeping Operations (UN). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York. In 2001, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2009 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2009, he received the Charles E. Merriam Award of the American Political Science Association. The award is given biennially “to a person whose published work and career represent a significant contribution to the art of government through the application of social science research.” In 2011, he received the Hubert H. Humphrey Award “for notable public service,” also from the American Political Science Association.
In 2001-2003, he served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. His responsibilities in the Secretary-General’s Executive Office included strategic planning (the “Millennium Development Goals”), outreach to the international corporate sector (the “Global Compact’) and relations with Washington. He is the former chair of the Academic Council of the United Nations System. From 2006-2013, he served as an individual member and the chair of the UN Democracy Fund, elected by the members and appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Michael Doyle is married to Amy Gutmann. They have a daughter and son-in-law and live in Philadelphia and New York.
