Alexander Cooley
Biographic Data
| ID | 332201 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander Cooley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander |
| FAMILY NAME | Cooley |
| SIGNATURE | COOLEY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Barnard College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5611-630X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 522 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Transnational Authoritarianism
In a globalised world, authoritarian politics does not stay within state borders. Autocrats and their allies reach abroad to influence their international environment to, at a minimum, protect authoritarianism at home or, more ambitiously, to promote pro-authoritarian norms and practices abroad. A rich stream of political science literature – comparative, international and area studies – has mapped the contours of this ‘transnational authoritaria…
The Uprisings of Gaza
The Arab uprisings spawned a new body of theoretical, empirical, and methodological advances by political scientists of the Middle East. This essay reflects upon the contributions of the edited volume The Political Science of the Middle East: Theory and Research since the Arab Uprisings to address three occurring central issues at the intersection of regional studies and political science that are affected by geopolitical shocks: how shocks highl…
Transnational uncivil society networks
What is the global social context for the insertion of kleptocratic elites into the putatively liberal international order? Drawing on cases from our work on Eurasia and Africa, we sketch a concept of ‘transnational uncivil society’, which we contrast to ‘transnational activist networks’. While the latter denotes the liberalizing practices of global civil society, the former suggests a specific series of clientelistic relations across borders, wh…
Out of balance
The terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, shook the world but were of special importance to post-Soviet Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.Overnight, the region went from a relatively quiet spot on the periphery of the former Soviet empire to finding itself on the frontline in the new US-led Global War on Terror (GWOT).The Central Asian governments agreed to host US and allied military facil…
Estimating Alliance Costs
All Societies Die
This ambitious, concise book makes the critical argument that the world is exhibiting many of the signs of terminal illness that have preceded the collapse of nation-states, empires, and civilizations. Along the way, Cohn examines an impressive and eclectic range of heterogenous social phenomena—state collapse in Somalia, the rise of drug cartels in Colombia, and the decline of corporate taxation in the United States—and historical episodes (in R…
On the brink and at the world’s edge
Western scholarship on the foreign policies of the post-Soviet Central Asian states has consistently framed the region as marginalized but ripe for Great Power influence and poised to assume a more important role in world affairs. This article explores the analytical assumptions, institutional agendas, and geopolitical drivers of scholarly and policy portrayals of Central Asia, emphasizing the key role played by the Western military intervention …
Exit from Hegemony
We live in a period of uncertainty about the fate of American global leadership and the future of international order. The 2016 election of Donald Trump led many to pronounce the death, or at least terminal decline, of liberal international order—the system of institutions, rules, and values associated with the American-dominated international system. But the truth is that the unraveling of American global order began over a decade earlier. Exit …
(No) Exit from liberalism
Post-Cold War expansion of liberal order rested on three legs: the implosion of major alternative ordering projects, the enjoyment by liberal democracies of a “patronage monopoly,” and the dominance of liberalizing transitional activist networks and movements. By 2019, all three of those legs have been turned upside down. China and Russia, among others, offer new ordering projects, countries enjoy “exit options” in the form of alternative patrona…
Ordering Eurasia
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the post-Communist states were integrated at light speed into the organizations, institutions, and norms of the liberal international order. During the 1990s, Western regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and democratic norms became important pillars of an international security and governance architecture that seemingly locked in the post-Communist states, whose regimes were eager to d…
Revising order or challenging the balance of military power? An alternative typology of revisionist and status-quo states
Unimensional accounts of revisionism – those that align states along a single continuum from supporting the status quo to seeking a complete overhaul of the international system – miss important variation between a desire to alter the balance of military power and a desire to alter other elements of international order. We propose a two-dimensional property space that generates four ideal types: status-quo actors, who are satisfied with both orde…
Centred discourse, decentred practice
This paper challenges dominant understandings of ‘rising powers’ by developing a decentred, relational account of Russia and China in Central Asia. We ask whether Moscow and Beijing’s regional integrative strategies do not guide, but rather are led by, everyday interactions among Russian and Chinese actors, and local actors in Central Asia. Rising powers, as a derivative of ‘Great Powers’, are frequently portrayed as structurally comparable units…
Laundering Cash, White Washing Reputations
A growing body of analysis has explored how kleptocrats systematically capture and loot their domestic state institutions, but scholars and policy makers have paid less attention to how globalization enables grand corruption, as well as the laundering of kleptocrats’ finances and reputations. Shell companies and new forms of international investment, such as luxury real-estate purchases, serve to launder the ill-gotten gains of kleptocrats and di…
Dictators without borders
A penetrating look into the unrecognised and unregulated links between autocratic regimes in Central Asia and centres of power and wealth throughout the West. Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is in reality a globalisation leader with e…
Transnational Corruption and the Globalized Individual
We present a new, more transnational, networked perspective on corruption. It is premised on the importance of professional intermediaries who constitute networks facilitating cross-border illicit finance, the blurring of legal and illegal capital flows, and the globalization of the individual via multiple claims of residence and citizenship. This perspective contrasts with notions of corruption as epitomized by direct, unmediated transfers betwe…
Interpersonal Networks and International Security
This chapter challenges the new hierarchy studies by demonstrating that while subordinate states may strike bargains with patrons that cede some of their sovereignty, they can also strategically manipulate personal ties with a patron to consolidate influence within the patron’s decision-making structures. Personal ties between regimes actually can reduce the authority and capacity of the patron to control the client and result in “reverse sociali…
Edward A. Allworth (1920–2016)
Edward Alfred Allworth, Professor Emeritus of Turco-Soviet Studies in the Department of Middle East Languages and Cultures at Columbia University and member of the Harriman Institute faculty for ov
Ranking the World
Over the last decade, international rankings have emerged as a critical tool used by international actors engaged in global governance. State practices and performance are now judged by a number of high-profile indices, including assessments of their levels of corruption, quality of democracy, creditworthiness, media freedom, and business environment. However, these rankings always carry value judgments, methodological choices, and implicit polit…
Legacies of Empire
The nation-state is a fairly recent historical phenomenon. Human history over the past two to four millennia has been dominated by empires, and the legacies of these empires continues to shape the contemporary world in ways that are not always recognised or fully understood. Much research and writing about European colonial empires has focused on relations between them and their colonies. This book examines the phenomenon of empire from a differe…
Offshore Central Asia
Article
Blurring the line between licit and illicit
The anti-corruption norm in both scholarship and the policy world has too narrowly focused on the domestic and institutional context of bribe-taking and public corruption. Instead, we argue that corruption in the contemporary global economy requires a multiple set of connected transactions, processes, and relationships that take place within informal transnational networks that blur the line between illegal and legal activities. These networks in…
Authoritarianism Goes Global
Over the past decade, the international backlash against liberal democracy has grown and gathered momentum. Authoritarians have experimented with and refined a number of new tools, practices, and institutions that are meant to shield their regimes from external criticism and to erode the norms that inform and underlie the liberal international political order. These global political changes and systemic shifts have produced new counternorms that …
Central Asia’s Inside-Out Foreign Economic Relations
The Empire Will Compensate You
Many commentators refer to the U.S. overseas network of military installations as an “empire,” yet very few have examined the theoretical and practical significance of such an analogy. This article explores the similarities and differences between the basing network and imperial systems. We argue that American basing practices and relations combine elements of liberal multilateralism with “neo-imperial” hegemony. Much, but far from all, of the ne…
Great Games, Local Rules
The struggle between Russia and Great Britain over Central Asia in the nineteenth century was the original “great game”. For the British, control over the region protected their vital possessions in the subcontinent. For an expanding Russian Empire, Central Asia represented the next step in their evolution as a great power. In the past quarter century, a new “great game” has emerged. Not only is the region enmeshed in America's global war on terr…
The NGO Scramble
International Security - Volume 27, Number 1, Summer 2002
Authoritarianism Goes Global
Over the past decade, the international backlash against liberal democracy has grown and gathered momentum. Authoritarians have experimented with and refined a number of new tools, practices, and institutions that are meant to shield their regimes from external criticism and to erode the norms that inform and underlie the liberal international political order. These global political changes and systemic shifts have produced new counternorms that …
The Empire Will Compensate You
Many commentators refer to the U.S. overseas network of military installations as an “empire,” yet very few have examined the theoretical and practical significance of such an analogy. This article explores the similarities and differences between the basing network and imperial systems. We argue that American basing practices and relations combine elements of liberal multilateralism with “neo-imperial” hegemony. Much, but far from all, of the ne…
Engagement without Recognition
Transnational Corruption and the Globalized Individual
We present a new, more transnational, networked perspective on corruption. It is premised on the importance of professional intermediaries who constitute networks facilitating cross-border illicit finance, the blurring of legal and illegal capital flows, and the globalization of the individual via multiple claims of residence and citizenship. This perspective contrasts with notions of corruption as epitomized by direct, unmediated transfers betwe…
Laundering Cash, White Washing Reputations
A growing body of analysis has explored how kleptocrats systematically capture and loot their domestic state institutions, but scholars and policy makers have paid less attention to how globalization enables grand corruption, as well as the laundering of kleptocrats’ finances and reputations. Shell companies and new forms of international investment, such as luxury real-estate purchases, serve to launder the ill-gotten gains of kleptocrats and di…
Logics of hierarchy
Political science has had trouble generating models that unify the study of the formation and consolidation of various types of states and empires. The business-administration literature, however, has long experience in observing organizations. According to a dominant model in this field, business firms generally take one of two forms: unitary (U) or multidivisional (M). The U-form organizes its various elements along the lines of administrative …
Ordering Eurasia
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the post-Communist states were integrated at light speed into the organizations, institutions, and norms of the liberal international order. During the 1990s, Western regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and democratic norms became important pillars of an international security and governance architecture that seemingly locked in the post-Communist states, whose regimes were eager to d…
Revising order or challenging the balance of military power? An alternative typology of revisionist and status-quo states
Unimensional accounts of revisionism – those that align states along a single continuum from supporting the status quo to seeking a complete overhaul of the international system – miss important variation between a desire to alter the balance of military power and a desire to alter other elements of international order. We propose a two-dimensional property space that generates four ideal types: status-quo actors, who are satisfied with both orde…
Dictators without borders
A penetrating look into the unrecognised and unregulated links between autocratic regimes in Central Asia and centres of power and wealth throughout the West. Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? This hard-hitting book argues that Central Asia is in reality a globalisation leader with e…
Blurring the line between licit and illicit
The anti-corruption norm in both scholarship and the policy world has too narrowly focused on the domestic and institutional context of bribe-taking and public corruption. Instead, we argue that corruption in the contemporary global economy requires a multiple set of connected transactions, processes, and relationships that take place within informal transnational networks that blur the line between illegal and legal activities. These networks in…
Booms and Busts
(2001). BOOMS AND BUSTS: THEORIZING INSTITUTIONAL FORMATION AND CHANGE IN OIL STATES. Review of International Political Economy: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 163-180
No Way to Treat Our Friends
The tragic August conflict between Georgia and Russia has initiated a wave of accusations about which side was to blame for the outbreak of full-scale war. The war and its aftermath have ratcheted tensions between the West and Russia, as the international community pressures Moscow to withdraw its troops from Georgian territory and abide by its ceasefire obligations. Russia's reckless decision to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Ab…
U.S. Bases and Democratization in Central Asia
Base Politics
Imperial Wreckage
January 01 2001 Imperial Wreckage: Property Rights, Sovereignty, and Security in the Post-Soviet Space Alexander Cooley Alexander Cooley Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Alexander Cooley Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Onli…
On the brink and at the world’s edge
Western scholarship on the foreign policies of the post-Soviet Central Asian states has consistently framed the region as marginalized but ripe for Great Power influence and poised to assume a more important role in world affairs. This article explores the analytical assumptions, institutional agendas, and geopolitical drivers of scholarly and policy portrayals of Central Asia, emphasizing the key role played by the Western military intervention …
Base Motives
The Japanese prefecture of Okinawa has witnessed a great deal of protest activity against the U.S. military bases on the island. Antibase sentiment is regularly expressed by the local press and the local cultural and educational institutions. A brutal 1995 crime committed by U.S. military personnel on the island inflamed public opinion against the bases. Yet the U.S. base presence endures, and the antibase activity of the late 1990s was defused r…
Thinking rationally about hierarchy and global governance
Recent scholarship on globalization has conflated methodological critiques of rationalism with ontological arguments. American rationalist paradigms of IPE, it is argued, are too state-centred and utilitarian to offer convincing explanations for emerging non-state forms of global governance. In response, this essay argues that rationalist theories do provide important theoretical tools to understand the political economy of globalization, even in…
(No) Exit from liberalism
Post-Cold War expansion of liberal order rested on three legs: the implosion of major alternative ordering projects, the enjoyment by liberal democracies of a “patronage monopoly,” and the dominance of liberalizing transitional activist networks and movements. By 2019, all three of those legs have been turned upside down. China and Russia, among others, offer new ordering projects, countries enjoy “exit options” in the form of alternative patrona…
Centred discourse, decentred practice
This paper challenges dominant understandings of ‘rising powers’ by developing a decentred, relational account of Russia and China in Central Asia. We ask whether Moscow and Beijing’s regional integrative strategies do not guide, but rather are led by, everyday interactions among Russian and Chinese actors, and local actors in Central Asia. Rising powers, as a derivative of ‘Great Powers’, are frequently portrayed as structurally comparable units…
Offshore Central Asia
Article
Base Closings
This article examines the conditions under which the United States foreign military bases become a contentious political issue in democratic base-hosting countries. Democratic consolidation, and in particular the institutionalization of the party system, reduces the incentives for political elites to mobilize domestic political support in opposition to foreign military presence. In the Spanish case, changes in the pattern of party competition exp…
Principles in the pipeline
After a decade of relative neglect post-Soviet Central Asia has become a foreign policy priority for the transatlantic community. Both the United States and Europe have engaged with the region in recent years in pursuit of new strategic interests, including maintaining military basing access in support of coalition operations in Afghanistan and securing the export of Central Asian oil and gas to the West. Despite this period of renewed engagement…
International Aid to the Former Soviet States
Foreign aid may be inadvertently undermining popular support for economic reform and encouraging governments to use quasi-authoritarian tactics
Identity politics and the international system
This article considers the relative significance of the international dimension in conditioning the process of identity politics mobilization in post‐colonial and emerging states. It highlights the importance of both material and ideational variables to explain why certain identities and their institutional bases are altered, transformed and ultimately selected over other competing identities. In illustrating our argument, we utilize a number of …
Awards
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International Aid to the Former Soviet States
Foreign aid may be inadvertently undermining popular support for economic reform and encouraging governments to use quasi-authoritarian tactics
Booms and Busts
(2001). BOOMS AND BUSTS: THEORIZING INSTITUTIONAL FORMATION AND CHANGE IN OIL STATES. Review of International Political Economy: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 163-180
Imperial Wreckage
January 01 2001 Imperial Wreckage: Property Rights, Sovereignty, and Security in the Post-Soviet Space Alexander Cooley Alexander Cooley Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Alexander Cooley Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Onli…
Contracting for Development
Journal Article Contracting for Development: The Role of For-Profit Contractors in U.S. Foreign Development Assistance Get access Contracting for Development: The Role of For-Profit Contractors in U.S. Foreign Development Assistance by Ruben Berrios. Westport, CT, Praeger Publishers, 2000. 184 pp. $55.00. Alexander Cooley Alexander Cooley Barnard College, Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar…
The NGO Scramble
International Security - Volume 27, Number 1, Summer 2002
National Purpose in the World Economy
Thinking rationally about hierarchy and global governance
Recent scholarship on globalization has conflated methodological critiques of rationalism with ontological arguments. American rationalist paradigms of IPE, it is argued, are too state-centred and utilitarian to offer convincing explanations for emerging non-state forms of global governance. In response, this essay argues that rationalist theories do provide important theoretical tools to understand the political economy of globalization, even in…
Logics of hierarchy
Political science has had trouble generating models that unify the study of the formation and consolidation of various types of states and empires. The business-administration literature, however, has long experience in observing organizations. According to a dominant model in this field, business firms generally take one of two forms: unitary (U) or multidivisional (M). The U-form organizes its various elements along the lines of administrative …
Base Politics
Base Motives
The Japanese prefecture of Okinawa has witnessed a great deal of protest activity against the U.S. military bases on the island. Antibase sentiment is regularly expressed by the local press and the local cultural and educational institutions. A brutal 1995 crime committed by U.S. military personnel on the island inflamed public opinion against the bases. Yet the U.S. base presence endures, and the antibase activity of the late 1990s was defused r…
U.S. Bases and Democratization in Central Asia
How the West Failed Georgia
Research Article| October 01 2008 How the West Failed Georgia Alexander Cooley Alexander Cooley Alexander Cooley is an associate professor at Barnard College and a member of the Study Group on US-Russia and Georgia Relations at Columbia University's Harriman Institute. He is the author of Base Politics: Democratic Change and the US Military Overseas (Cornell University Press, 2008). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Googl…
Principles in the pipeline
After a decade of relative neglect post-Soviet Central Asia has become a foreign policy priority for the transatlantic community. Both the United States and Europe have engaged with the region in recent years in pursuit of new strategic interests, including maintaining military basing access in support of coalition operations in Afghanistan and securing the export of Central Asian oil and gas to the West. Despite this period of renewed engagement…
Contracting States
Increasingly today nation-states are entering into agreements that involve the sharing or surrendering of parts of their sovereign powers and often leave the cession of authority incomplete or vague. But until now, we have known surprisingly little about how international actors design and implement these mixed-sovereignty arrangements. Contracting States uses the concept of "incomplete contracts"--agreements that are intentionally ambiguous and …
Behind the Central Asian Curtain
Recent events have made Moscow's attempts to preserve its exclusive regional control seem no longer feasible or cost-effective
No Way to Treat Our Friends
The tragic August conflict between Georgia and Russia has initiated a wave of accusations about which side was to blame for the outbreak of full-scale war. The war and its aftermath have ratcheted tensions between the West and Russia, as the international community pressures Moscow to withdraw its troops from Georgian territory and abide by its ceasefire obligations. Russia's reckless decision to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Ab…
Kyrgyzstan on the Brink
Intensified geopolitical competition ... could further destabilize the country and change it from a collapsing state into a bona fide failed state
Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action
Advocacy organizations are viewed as actors motivated primarily by principled beliefs. This volume outlines a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations, proposing a model of NGOs as collective actors that seek to fulfil normative concerns and instrumental incentives, face collective action problems, and compete as well as collaborate with other advocacy actors. The analogy of the firm is a useful way of studying advocacy actors because i…
Engagement without Recognition
Base Closings
This article examines the conditions under which the United States foreign military bases become a contentious political issue in democratic base-hosting countries. Democratic consolidation, and in particular the institutionalization of the party system, reduces the incentives for political elites to mobilize domestic political support in opposition to foreign military presence. In the Spanish case, changes in the pattern of party competition exp…
Base Politics
According to the Department of Defense's 2004 Base Structure Report, the United States officially maintains 860 overseas military installations and another 115 on noncontinental U.S. territories. Over the last fifteen years the Department of Defense has been moving from a few large-footprint bases to smaller and much more numerous bases across the globe. This so-called lily-pad strategy, designed to allow high-speed reactions to military emergenc…
Great Games, Local Rules
The struggle between Russia and Great Britain over Central Asia in the nineteenth century was the original “great game”. For the British, control over the region protected their vital possessions in the subcontinent. For an expanding Russian Empire, Central Asia represented the next step in their evolution as a great power. In the past quarter century, a new “great game” has emerged. Not only is the region enmeshed in America's global war on terr…
Weapons of the Wealthy
Journal Article Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia by Scott Radnitz Get access Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protests in Central Asia by Scott Radnitz. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2010. 231 pp. $35.00. Alexander Cooley Alexander Cooley Barnard College, Columbia University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quar…
Political science (42 works) · Law (34 works) · Politics (32 works) · Political economy (25 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Economics (22 works) · Law (21 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (15 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (14 works) · Russia and Soviet political economy (10 works)