Michael W. Doyle

Michael W. Doyle (born 1948) is an American international relations scholar best known as a theorist of the liberal “democratic peace” and author of “Liberalism and World Politics,”the 16th most cited article in the 100-year history of the American Political Science Review. He has also written widely on the comparative history of empires and the evaluation of UN peace-keeping.
He is a University Professor (Columbia) of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs. He is the director of Columbia Global Policy Initiative. He co-directs the Center on Global Governance at Columbia Law School. His most recent publication is The Question of Intervention: John Stuart Mill and the Responsibility to Protect (Yale Press, 2015.)

Michael W. Doyle was born in Honolulu, HI and graduated from Jesuit High School in Tampa, FL He earned his A.B., M.A. and PhD in Political Science all from Harvard University. He also studied at the US Air Force Academy, trained as a parachutist at Ft. Benning and completed his military service in the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

Doyle has taught at the University of Warwick, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and Yale Law School. At Princeton University, he directed the Center of International Studies and chaired the Editorial Board and the Committee of Editors of World Politics. He has long been a member and is now the chair of the board of the International Peace Institute. He was also 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 Council of Foreign Relations, New York.

Kant's Perpetual Peace

In his 1983 essay "Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs", Doyle builds on Immanuel Kant's views on various issues; especially noted are his views on liberal internationalism. Doyle discusses the two legacies of modern liberalism: The pacification of foreign relations among liberal states (see below) and international imprudence.

Awards and honors

In 2001, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in 2009, to the American Philosophical Society. In 2012, he was named the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. On July 15, 2014 the University of Warwick conferred an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) upon Doyle in recognition of his research and publications on Peace Theory.

In 2009, he received the Charles E. Merriam Award for Outstanding Public Policy Research of the American Political Science Association, a biennial award given “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 APSA's Hubert H. Humphrey Award "in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist."

Public service

Doyle served as Assistant Secretary-General and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In the Secretary General’s Executive Office, he was responsible for strategic planning, including the Millennium Development Goals, outreach to the international corporate sector through the Global Compact, and relations with Washington. He is the former chair of the Academic Council on the United Nations System.

He was also, most recently, the chair of United Nations Democracy Fund from 2007 to 2013, elected by the members and appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

He is married to Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania. Their daughter, Abigail Doyle, received her A.B., A.M., and PhD from Harvard University in chemistry. Abigail is currently a professor of chemistry at Princetonwhere the lab she leads is known as The Doyle Group.

• The Question of Intervention: John Stuart Mill and the Responsibility to Protect (Yale Press)
• Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (W.W. Norton)
• Empires (Cornell University Press)
• Liberal Peace: Selected Essays (Routledge)
• UN Peacekeeping in Cambodia: UNTAC’s Civil Mandate (Lynne Rienner Publishers)
• Striking First: Preemption and Prevention of International Conflict (Princeton Press)
• Making War and Building Peace (Princeton Press) with Nicholas Sambanis
• Alternatives to Monetary Disorder (Council on Foreign Relations/McGraw Hill) with Fred Hirsch and Edward Morse
• Keeping the Peace (Cambridge University Press) edited with Ian Johnstone and Robert Orr
• Peacemaking and Peacekeeping for the New Century (Rowman and Littlefield) edited with Olara Otunnu
• New Thinking in International Relations Theory (Westview) edited with John Ikenberry
• The Globalization of Human Rights (United Nations University Press) edited with Jean-Marc Coicaud and Anne-Marie Gardner