Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service.

Daniel Nexon’s academic work covers a range of subjects, most notably international-relations theory, international order, U.S. foreign policy, and power politics. The primary focus of his scholarship is on “international hierarchy”: the dynamics of empires, hegemonic powers, confederations, and other logics of international and transnational governance.

Professor Nexon— along with his frequent co-author, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson — was an early and influential advocate of relational approaches to the study of world politics

His first book, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010. His second book, Exit from Hegemony: The Unravelling of American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-authored with Alex Cooley, explores the contentious politics of international order. He is co-editor of Undermining American Hegemon: Goods Substitution in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Harry Potter and International Relations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

He has held fellowships at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010, he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. From 2014-2018, he was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly.

Nexon has also written for such non-academic outlets as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic.

He helped coordinate a volunteer foreign-policy group for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. He remains interested in how progressives should think about — and pursue — foreign policy.

Nexon co-hosts a podcast, with Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, called “Whiskey and International Relations Theory,” which is pretty much what it sounds like (and soon, we hope, to emerge from hibernation), and contributes to two group weblogs: Lawyers, Guns and Money and The Duck of Minerva. He spends less time than he used to on social media. If you’re looking for him online, then your best bet is Bluesky.