Michael C Williams

Research

I am most interested in the relationship between ideas and action in world politics. My earliest research was involved in developing critical approaches to security that took seriously the interplay between theories and practices. This led to the publication of one of the first books in the field, Critical Security Studies, edited with Keith Krause. Subsequently, I sought to blend this focus on ideas with sociological theory inspired particularly by Pierre Bourdieu. This led to the publication of Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security in 2006, and then to a five-year research project on the globalization of private security undertaken with Rita Abrahamsen that resulted in our co-authored 2011 book Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics.
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This engagement with security has always run in parallel with an interest in intellectual history and particularly with International Relations theory. In 2005, I published The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations, a book that seeks to understand classical realist thinking about world politics. This was followed by an edited book focused on the most influential postwar realist, Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations. I believe classical remains a key resource for thinking about world politics – one that is too often caricatured.
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Focusing on the role of ideas in political practices has led in multiple directions. For me, two of the most important are the role of images in politics, and the recent rise of radical conservative movements and their impact on international relations and foreign policy.

I explore the role of images in two articles in International Studies Quarterly, ‘Words, Images, Enemies’ and ‘International Relations in the Age of the Image’. Both explore the intellectual lineages of images in political thought and their crucial importance today.

My most recent research on radical conservatism and the Global Right brings many of these themes together, analyzing the evolution and importance of conservative ideas in these increasingly prominent movements, and the ways that those ideas are strategically deployed in practice to challenge prevailing ideas and institutions about2world order. A number of these themes are brought together the co-authored book, The World of the Right: Radical Conservatism World Order, published in 2024.

My new research project is on what I call the crisis of the conservative international order, where I argue that what we are seeing in world politics today is not simply a crisis of the ‘liberal international order’ or LIO, but of the CIO – the conservative international order. The postwar order was not constructed by liberals alone. It was also built by conservative governments, politicians, and intellectuals that were crucial parts of the domestic and international accommodations, coalitions, and alliances underpinning the creation and maintenance of the postwar order. The crisis we are witnessing today is, in turn, to a large degree the result of the implosion that has transformed conservatism from a supporter of that order to one of its most powerful opponents. 

My articles on these and other themes have appeared in leading international journals, including International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Theory, the European Journal of International Relations, and the Review of International Studies.