Alexander Cooley

Biography Cooley graduated from Swarthmore College and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, studying under Hendrik Spruyt and Mark von Hagen. He taught at Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty of Barnard College in 2001, eventually serving as chair of the college's political science department.

Cooley has written extensively about the politics of the former-Soviet states, with an emphasis on Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as the liberal international order and democratic backsliding. His analysis of great power politics in Central Asia was called by National Bureau of Asian Research as "possibly the most cogent critique of post–Cold War orthodoxy published to date."