Alexander Cooley

Cooley graduated from Swarthmore College and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, studying under Hendrik Spruyt and Mark von Hagen.[2] He taught at Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty of Barnard College in 2001, eventually serving as chair of the college's political science department.[1] In 2015, he was named director of Columbia's Harriman Institute, serving in the position for six years.[3]

Cooley has written extensively about the politics of the Former-Soviet states, with an emphasis on Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as the liberal international order and democratic backsliding.[4][5][6] His analysis of great power politics in Central Asia was called by National Bureau of Asian Research as "possibly the most cogent critique of post–Cold War orthodoxy published to date."[7]

• Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States, and Military Occupations, Cornell University Press, 2005.
• Base Politics: Democratic Change and the U.S. Military Overseas, Cornell University Press, 2008.
• Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations, Princeton University Press, 2009.
• Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Ranking the World: Grading states as a Tool of Global Governance, Cambridge University Press, 2015
• Dictators Without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia, Yale University Press, 2017.
• Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order, Oxford University Press, 2020.
• Undermining American Hegemony: Goods Substitution in World Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Cooley's father was journalist John K. Cooley, who served as an editor of The Christian Science Monitor.[2]