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Professor Michael Cox taught at The Queen’s University of Belfast and the Department of International Politics in Aberystwyth before being appointed to a Chair in International Relations at the LSE in 2002. One of the founding directors of LSE IDEAS in 2008, he is currently Emeritus Professor in the Department of International Relations at the LSE, holds a visiting professorship at the Catholic University of Milan and is an Associate Fellow on the US and Americas programme at Chatham House in London. He is the author, editor and co-editor of several volumes including works on the Cold War, US foreign policy, Northern Ireland, E.H. Carr and John Maynard Keynes. His most recent books include Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden (Bristol University Press, 2022), Agonie dell’impero: il potere americano da Clinton a Biden (Vita E Pensiero Press, 2022) Afghanistan: Long War – Forgotten Peace (LSE Press, 2022) and with the same press, Ukraine: Russia’s War and the International System, which will be launched in October 2023. He is also now working on a study of the China-Russia relationship entitled Comrades to be published by Polity Press in 2024.

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

I am impressed and encouraged by the resurgence of critical discourses across the field of IR in the past few years. Previously underexplored or unexplored issues such as race and the legacies of colonialism have by now made a major contribution to the modern debate. It is perhaps ironic then that just as IR was moving in new directions, it has been pushed by events – the war in Ukraine and rising tensions across the Pacific – to focus on what might best be described as more traditional ‘geopolitical’ issues, most notably great power conflict and the causes and consequences of war. Was it Trotsky who once quipped that even if “you may not be interested in war” …war will always be “interested in you.” Worth pondering! 

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

When I set out lecturing in the 1970s at Queen’s Belfast – right at the start of the ‘Troubles’ – Third World revolutions were shaking the world, China was still viewed as being a deeper shade of ‘red’, and the USSR was still being talked about as being a major threat to the international order. Nor did anybody back then refer to something called ‘globalization’. Europe was also a long way off becoming a ‘union’. And the US post-Vietnam looked to be in deep trouble. One thing however looked certain: The Cold War would go on either because neither side seemed to be on the verge of collapse, or because the two superpower rivals could co-exist reasonably enough in a bipolar order from which both drew advantage. 

What prompted change in my thinking – and not just mine – was the quite unexpected disintegration of the communist project in the USSR in less than a decade. I later tried to explain what ‘we’ got wrong (and why) in two articles: one published in 1994: 'The end of the USSR and the collapse of Soviet........

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