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Patrick O. Cohrs is Professor of International History at the University of Florence. He also serves as Director of the Centre for History, Strategy and International Order(CHIOS) at Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, which he co-founded. He was Associate Professor of History and International Relations at Yale University, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. He also was a visiting professor at the Sciences Po in Paris, LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, Helmut-Schmidt-University Hamburg, and the University of Oxford.

Patrick O. Cohrs is the author of The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860–1933 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Prose Award in World History, and The Unfinished Peace after World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He is now working on A World Transformed, the third and final volume of his trilogy on the transformation of the modern Atlantic and global order, which will reappraise the second half of the long twentieth century (1933–2022). For further information please visit: www.patrickocohrs.com.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field? 

I consider the big picture analysis of the global Cold War that Arne Westad and scholars inspired by his work have been pursuing steadfastly as the most exciting in my field. I also think highly of Jürgen Osterhammel and those who, in his wake, have sought to provide a much fuller global interpretation of how the world was transformed in the long 19th century. With a view to younger scholars, I find especially promising Alanna O'Malley's and Haakon Ikonomou's work on international organisations within a changing global order, notably the League of Nations and the United Nations, and the biographic and intellectual trajectories of those who shaped them.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

On a biographical level, I think my view of the world has never radically shifted, but it has changed by gaining personal experience of its richness and complexity over time, travelling far and wide and becoming ever more curious about how the world works and "what holds it together at its innermost". In particular, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and September 11, 2001, undoubtedly pushed me to reevaluate my understanding of the subject. 

On a deeper level, I would say that my interest in world history — and in those who wrote about it most profoundly — has had the most defining and, in the end, transformative impact. Some time ago, I concluded that it is impossible to gain a deeper understanding of the world without engaging with the grand arcs of history and trying to fathom how fundamental questions of war and peace, politics, culture and order have developed and been addressed by humankind, from the days of Ancient Greece to our increasingly disorderly 21st-century world. 

You have written two books examining the development of the international order during the 20th century. The first one, The Unfinished Peace after World War I (2006), was published 16 years before The New Atlantic Order (2022). How are these two books connected?

Both of these books are indeed closely interconnected. The New Atlantic Order is a more comprehensive and far-reaching work that builds on the first but offers a significantly expanded reappraisal of core themes of modern international politics. It........

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