About

Daniel Deudney is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches international relations and political theory. He holds a BA in political science and philosophy from Yale University, an MPA in science, technology, and public policy from George Washington University, and a PhD in political science from Princeton University. His research interests encompass general international relations theory, international political theory and republicanism, and contemporary global issues such as nuclear policy, outer space, environment, and energy. Deudney has contributed extensively to the field through his publications, including co-authoring 'RENEWABLE ENERGY' and co-editing 'CONTESTED GROUNDS: Conflict and Security in the New Global Environmental Politics.' His notable book, 'BOUNDING POWER: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village,' received awards from the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association. His most recent book is 'DARK SKIES: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics and the Ends of Humanity.' Over his twenty years of teaching, he has received four major teaching awards, including the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award at Johns Hopkins University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Physics
• Law
• Philosophy
• Law and economics
• Political economy
• Astronomy
• Geology
• Astrobiology

Selected publications

• Bounding Superpowers: The ASI Control Problem, Public Safety, and Republican Constitutionalism

  Palgrave Studies in International Relations · 2025-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Nuclear One-Worldisms, Planetary Vulnerability and Whole Earth Security

  2024-02-27 · 3 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Nuclear weapons have triggered a great debate on world political order across three phases and with three main positions: repair, reform and revolution. The revolutionary answer, nuclear one-worldism (NOW), argues for major world order changes arising from the intersection of new knowledges about the material world and a cascade of technological empowerments in collision with basic and long-standing human goals of survival, security and well-being. Early NOW thinkers viewed a world state as the necessary solution, but more recent versions advocate deep arms control and nuclear zero. NOW 2.0 has been strengthened by discoveries of biospheric vulnerability to major nuclear war. New historical evidence indicates nuclear war has been more likely than the repair and reform school believed. NOW thinking helped end the Cold War. A Whole Earth Security system would de-weaponise the planetary commons, have test bans, ‘open labs,’ circumscribed sovereign immunity, and educational and ritual components.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Debating Worlds

  2023-03-23 · 9 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In the late twentieth century, the narrative of universalization of Western liberal democratic modernity dominated the international scene. A few decades later, a new plurality of narratives has emerged, reflecting both a global redistribution of geopolitical power and deep political transformation within Western liberal societies. Each of the new, or most often reinvented, narratives combines stories of the past with understandings of the present and attractive visions of the future. They constitute “narratives of the global,” i.e. macro-stories that actors generate to make sense of their place in global integration and development and use to formulate a call for action or a specific agenda. Although competing narratives have always existed in world politics, today’s narrative plurality has become increasingly salient and problematic, challenging the possibility of global regulation of fundamental issues—such as health, energy, and climate change—in an era marked by planet-wide cascading interdependences. Understanding this challenge entails first to map the main narratives that are at play in the growing contestation of the present global order. It also implies a historically informed discussion of the key features of narratives of the global: the focus of this volume is to provide genealogies of the content of a set of narratives that have in common sweeping stories speaking to challenges and experiences of global modernity, and to illuminate the roles and impacts that agents acting on their basis have had in world politics.

  PublisherDOI

• Copyright Page

  2023-03-23

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Extract Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2023-03-23 · 3 citations

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  International audience

  PublisherDOI

• The Great Schism

  2023-03-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Among the contested worldviews at play in world politics over the past several centuries, scientific technological modernity has been especially influential in transforming virtually every aspect of human life. It has fed a powerful future imaginary that, since the nineteenth century, has swollen to encompass the complete technological refashioning of the planet, reweaving the biological fabric of humanity, and expansion into the cosmos, and encompassing radically utopian and dystopian trajectories. The scientific-technological modernist project was initially linked to a technocratic vision of replacing politics with the administration of things. By the nineteenth century a debate emerged about whether liberal capitalism or universal socialism was best fitted to the new machine-based societies. As the civilization of scientific-technological modernity spread globally across the twentieth century, it began to face a great crisis, which has in turn generated a great internal schism, a battlefront of contestation that has increasingly defined world politics.

  PublisherDOI

• Dream-walking towards the planetoid bomb

  2022-06-20

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The DART mission to redirect an asteroid is billed as potentially planet-saving. But in the wrong hands it has seriously destructive potential. In September 2022 an event of planetary importance will take place. With the assistance of a privately funded rocket, NASA’s DART mission will test the feasibility of redirecting an asteroid. The mission is, […]

  PublisherDOI

• Getting Restraint Right: Liberal Internationalism and American Foreign Policy

  Survival · 2021-11-02 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Liberalism and its republican precursors provide the largest and best-developed body of restraint theory and practice. Realist, libertarian and other criticisms of liberalism and liberal internationalism fall short on both historical and theoretical grounds. Liberal internationalism has had a profoundly progressive – even revolutionary – impact on the modern world order, advancing the grand transition from a world of empire to a world of nation-states, building an infrastructure of rules and institutions to foster and protect liberal democracy, and generating international coalitions and projects for tackling the gravest threats to world order and humanity. Unlike the schools of thought that make up the Quincy coalition, liberal internationalism places at the centre of its vision the cooperative organisation of international order – led by the United States and other liberal democracies, allies and partners – to defend shared liberal values and manage global problems of interdependence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Misplaced Restraint: The Quincy Coalition Versus Liberal Internationalism

  Survival · 2021 · 38 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  The Quincy coalition is driven by common adversaries rather than a shared vision of political order and society; liberal internationalism is more appropriate to contemporary global realities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Seeds of Failure

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-12-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Thirty-years on, the high expectations that accompanied the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet communism have been largely confounded by the emergence of the autocratic Putin regime and the rekindling of Great Power rivalry between Russia and the United States. In this chapter, we argue that these outcomes were not inevitable, but rather were significantly the result of failures in Western, and particularly American, statecraft during the 1990s. First, the democratic transition was undermined by the type of economic transition, which Western policy networks promoted in post-Soviet Russia. Had Western influencers promoted a New Deal or social democratic model of economic transition, the distributional effects which undermined the legitimacy of the Yeltsin regime would have been far less severe. Second, the American failure to devise and pursue a strategy to effectively integrate Russia into a post-NATO European security architecture made it almost certain that “left out” Russia would react negatively to NATO expansion to the East. Had the United States followed up on Gorbachev’s vision of security architecture for a “Common European Home,” the ongoing clash between Russia and the West might well have been averted.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• G. John Ikenberry

  28 shared

• Thomas J. Biersteker

  Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

  4 shared

• William C. Wohlforth

  Dartmouth College

  4 shared

• John Agnew

  3 shared

• Christopher Flavin

  3 shared

• Edward J. Walsh

  2 shared

• Arthur M. Eckstein

  2 shared

• Karoline Postel Vinay

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  2 shared

Labs

• Krieger School of Arts & Sciences - Political Science, Johns Hopkins UniversityPI

Awards & honors

• Jervis-Schroeder Prize for the best book in international po…
• Book of the Decade award from the International Studies Asso…
• Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award at Johns Hopkins Univers…