Michael J. Williams

Michael John Williams joined the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs as associate professor in fall 2020. He teaches courses on great power conflict, transatlantic relations and international security.

Prior to joining Syracuse University,  Williams was Clinical Professor of International Relations and Director of the International Relations Program at New York University from 2014-2020. He arrived in New York for the University of London where he was Reader in International Relations. He previously had been Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Royal United Institute for Defense and Security Studies in London.

Williams’ research focuses functionally on international security with a regional concentration in twentieth-century Europe. He has published extensively in both academic and policy outlets on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as well as on issues of war and technology. His last book was Science, Law and Liberalism in the American Way of War: The Quest for Humanity in Conflict (Cambridge University Press). His work has been published in journals such as International Affairs, International Politics, International Peacekeeping, Global Governance and Cooperation & Conflict.

Williams is a Fellow of the Inter-University Seminar on the Armed Forces and the Royal Society for the Arts (UK). He has been a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a Senior Associate Scholar at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington D.C.  He held a Bosch Fellowship in the German Ministry of Defense, a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, and a DAAD Fellowship at the Bundeswehr Center for Social Science in Potsdam. He was an investigator in the Sustainable Peacebuilding Network, a collaborative research project involving 20 scholars from six countries, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He is currently a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington DC and co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal International Politics.

Williams earned an Honors BA with Distinction from the University of Delaware, his MA with Distinction from the Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin and his Ph.D. (2006) from London School of Economics & Political Science.