Korbel ranked 12th best place in the world to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
Korbel ranked 20th in the world for the best undergraduate degree in international studies.
Korbel ranked 12th best place in the world to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
Korbel ranked 20th in the world for the best undergraduate degree in international studies.
Professor
I was born and raised in Mt. Vernon, New York. I had the good fortune to be a student in DC during the Nixon era of Vietnam protests and Watergate, before heading west to Berkeley for my Phd. (Like a good New Yorker of my generation, I had been to Europe a number of times but never west of Pittsburgh.) After stints in the Boston area and at Chapel Hill, I came to DU in 1992, and hope to have the good fortune to die here at my desk in my nineties.
Most of my teaching and research in recent years has been in the area of International Relations Theory, although I still keep my hand in Human Rights, where I did most of my work during the first three decades of my career. I am particularly interested in ways of thinking about international politics and international systems that make globalization appear as a more or less "normal" phenomenon involving ongoing processes of continuous transformation that are reassembling, rather than radically altering, social and political worlds.
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Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Cornell University Press, 3rd ed., 20013.
Systems, Relations, and the Structures of International Societies. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
International Human Rights. Routledge, 6th ed., 2000.
"Levels, Centers, and Peripheries: The Spatio-Political Structure of International Societies." International Theory 2021, 13 (March): 1-35.
"Systems, Levels, and Structural Theory: Waltz"s Theory is Not a Structural Theory (and Why that Matters for IR Today)." European Journal of International Relations 2019, 25 (3): 904-930.
"Beyond Hierarchy." In Ayse Zarakol, ed. Hierarchies in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
"The Discourse of Anarchy in IR." International Theory 2015, 7 (November): 393-415.
"Normative versus Taxonomic Humanity: Varieties of Human Dignity in the Western Tradition." Journal of Human Rights 2015, 14 (January): 1-22.
"The Discourse of Anarchy in IR." International Theory 2015, 7 (November): 393-415.
"The Elements of the Structures of International Societies." International Organization 2012, 66 (Autumn): 609-643.
"Rethinking Political Structures: From ‘Ordering Principles" to ‘Vertical Differentiation" - and Beyond," International Theory 2009, 1 (March): 49-86.
"Human Rights and Social Provision," Journal of Human Rights 2008, 7 (June): 123-138.
"The Relative Universality of Human Rights," Human Rights Quarterly 2007, 29 (May): 281-306
"The West, Economic and Social Rights, and the Global Human Rights Regime: Setting the Record Straight," Human Rights Quarterly 2007, 29 (November): 908-949 (co-author with Daniel Whelan).
"Human Rights, Democracy, and Development," Human Rights Quarterly 1999, 21 (August): 608-632.
"Sovereign Inequalities and Hierarchy in Anarchy: American Power and International Society," European Journal of International Relations 2006, 12 (June): 139-170.
"Human Rights: A New Standard of Civilization?" International Affairs 1998, 74 (January): 1-24
"International Human Rights: A Regime Analysis," International Organization 1986, 40 (Summer): 599-642.
"Human Rights as Natural Rights," Human Rights Quarterly 1982, 4 (August): 391-405.
"Human Rights and Human Dignity: An Analytic Critique of Non-Western Human Rights Conceptions," American Political Science Review 1982, 76 (June): 303-16.
"Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights," Human Rights Quarterly 1984, 6 (November): 400-419.
Ph.D., Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 1982
M.A., Government, Georgetown University, 1975
B.S.F.S., Georgetown University, 1973
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