Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on February 23, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies for a lecture by Acting Director Jack Snyder. Moderated by Alexander Cooley.
Liberal great powers have been on the winning side of six out of the last six contests for hegemony in the international system. Their superiority is grounded in four “invisible hand” mechanisms that overcome problems of uncertainty and opportunism in decision making: free markets, free politics, free speech, and the liberal form of the balance of power. Illiberal powers like Russia lack these mechanisms, leading them down self-destructive paths.
However, for liberalism’s core systems to work well, these decentralized liberal systems of coordinated equilibrium need to be set up and managed by the visible hand of rule-making and regulation. Today’s crisis of the liberal order is caused by the deregulation of all four of liberalism’s subsystems. Liberalism’s comeback depends on achieving a better balance between the dynamism of “creative destruction” and the equilibrium of regulated decentralized interactions.
Jack Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the Political Science Department and Acting Director of the Harriman Institute. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his books include “Human Rights for Pragmatists: Social Power in Modern Times” (Princeton University Press, 2022), “Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance” (co-editor with Alexander Cooley, Cambridge University Press, 2015), and “Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition” (Cornell University Press, 1991; Chinese edition, 2007). His articles include “Backlash against Human Rights Shaming: Emotions in Groups,” International Theory 12:1 (2020), 109-132, and “The Broken Bargain: How Nationalism Came Back,” Foreign Affairs 98:2 (March/April 2019), 54-60. Snyder received a B.A. in government from Harvard University is 1973, the Certificate of Columbia’s Russian Institute in 1978, and a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia in 1981.
Interested participants should contact Eileen Huhn (eph2125@columbia.edu) for a copy of the paper in advance of the lecture.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
