Thomas Weiss

Thomas G. Weiss Thomas G. Weiss (born 1946) is a U.S. scholar and practitioner of international relations and global governance whose primary focus is on the politics of the United Nations. Among many honors, he was president of the International Studies Association in 2009–10, Rockefeller Bellagio fellow in 1993, and Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2016. The latter explored the concept of a world without the United Nations.

From 1998 to 2023, he was Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is now Professor Emeritus and Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. He also is Distinguished Fellow, Global Governance, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs; Global Eminence Scholar, Kyung Hee University, Seoul; and a researcher doing an oral history of Saint Leonard’s Ministries, a re-entry facility in Chicago. He pursued advanced studies at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva.

Contributions Thomas G. Weiss and Kofi Annan, marking the completion of the UN Intellectual History Project He served as an advisory board member for the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect from 2007 to 2014 and sits on the editorial boards of Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Third World Quarterly, Global Governance, and Global Responsibility to Protect. He was, along with Rorden Wilkinson, co-editor of Routledge's "Global Institutions Series," which produced 175 commissioned books. His prior positions affiliations include:

Director of the United Nations Intellectual History Project, with Louis Emmerij and Richard Jolly, 1999–2010, which produced 17 volumes and 85 oral histories of ideas in the United Nations, with Tatiana Carayannis, Weiss introduced the idea of the "third United Nations." Research Director of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, 2000–2002. This initiative developed the concept of the "responsibility to protect," and Weiss co-authored the supplementary volume—which traced the ethics, assessed the operational mechanics, and analyzed the political dimensions of the undertaking—that accompanied the final report of the commission. President of the International Studies Association, a professional association of scholars of international politics, 2009–2010, and recipient of its 2016 International Organization Distinguished Scholar Award. Chair of the Academic Council on the United Nations System, 2007–2009. Editor, Global Governance, 2000–2005. Director of The Future United Development Systems Project, with Stephen Browne, 2011–2017. Director of the Wartime United Nations Project, with Dan Plesch, 2011–2015.

Academic work

Weiss has authored or edited some 60 books and 275 articles and book chapters. His research interests focus primarily on the United Nations, global governance, humanitarianism, human rights, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, the protection of cultural heritage, and the role of ideas in shaping world order.