Michael Cox (academic)

• 1. Introduction

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  Michael E. Cox was born in March 1947, entering a world already divided between two nuclear-armed superpowers. He trained at the University of Reading and built his early career in Belfast. Belfast was then living through its own fierce internal conflict, even as Cold War tensions shaped global affairs. That double vantage point, one local, one global, gave Cox a perspective on power and its limits. His writing and institution-building would circle a consistent set of questions: what drives great powers, what breaks them, and what comes after? He has lectured in the United States, Australia, Asia, and across the European Union. The answers he pursued would eventually find a home at the London School of Economics.

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• 2. A Career in Transit

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  Queen's University Belfast held Cox for twenty-three years, from 1972 to 1995. During that long stretch, he also took shorter postings in the United States. San Diego State University had him in 1986, and the College of William and Mary in Virginia followed from 1987 to 1989. Those American stays placed him inside a country he would spend much of his career examining in print. After leaving Belfast, he moved to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he remained until 2001. Then came a peripatetic stretch across two more continents. He taught at the Catholic University of Milan in both 2003 and 2004, and at the University of Melbourne in 2004. Between 2003 and 2004, he was also a visiting professor at the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies in Canberra. In 2003, he became a chair at the London School of Economics. That appointment brought the itinerant years to a close and opened a more settled chapter of institution-building.

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• 3. Cold War to IDEAS

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  In 2004, Cox co-founded the Cold War Studies Centre at LSE alongside Professor Odd Arne Westad. The two served as the centre's co-directors and as co-editors of its journal, Cold War History. That publication gave researchers a dedicated venue for scholarship on the twentieth century's defining superpower confrontation. In 2008, the centre expanded into something more ambitious. LSE IDEAS emerged as a foreign policy centre designed to connect academic analysis with practical policymaking. By 2014, an international survey placed IDEAS second in the world among the best university-affiliated think tanks. Cox also used the LSE platform to build educational programmes for working professionals. In 2011, he launched an Executive Masters in Global Strategy, designed for mid-career practitioners in international relations, diplomacy, security, and international business. He serves as the programme's director. He has also acted as academic director of the LSE-PKU Summer School and the Executive Summer School. He also teaches for TRIUM, a Global Executive MBA programme linking NYU Stern, the London School of Economics, and HEC School of Management.

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• 4. Writing American Power

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  Beyond the Cold War: Superpowers at the Crossroads? appeared in 1990, Cox's debut book, published by the White Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs. The title announced the preoccupation that would run through his entire scholarly career. Five years later came US Foreign Policy After the Cold War: Superpower Without a Mission?, a Chatham House Paper. That 1995 title posed the central question of a decade. A superpower had won its defining contest but had not yet decided what to do next. In 1998, Cox edited a new Palgrave edition of E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis. A separate Palgrave volume, E. H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal, appeared in 2000. Cox has also edited collections on Northern Ireland, American democracy promotion, and twentieth-century international history. His most recent books push into the era after the Cold War's formal end. The Post Cold War World appeared from Routledge in 2018. Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden followed in 2022, published by Bristol University Press. Alongside that output, Cox has served as editor of three journals: the Review of International Studies, International Relations, and International Politics. He is the General Editor of the Palgrave series Rethinking World Politics and of Routledge's Cold War History. That editorial reach extended into the professional associations that govern the field, where Cox took on some of the most senior positions available.

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• 5. Positions and Influence

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  From 1994, Cox served as an associate research fellow at Chatham House in London. That position connected his scholarly work to one of Britain's most prominent foreign policy institutes. Between 2001 and 2002, he directed the David Davies Memorial Institute for the Study of International Politics. In 2002, he was appointed a senior fellow at the Nobel Institute in Oslo. In 2003, he chaired the United States Discussion Group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. That same year, he joined the board of the Cambridge Studies in International Relations. Cox has also sat on the executive committee of the British International Studies Association. He has served on the Irish National Committee for the Study of International Affairs as well. In 2006, he was elected chair of the European Consortium for Political Research. That organisation is the largest political science association in Europe and the second largest in the world. In recent lectures, Cox has focused especially on the rise of Asia. Whether the world is now in the midst of a major power shift is the question his entire career has been building toward.

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