Dr. Thomas Biersteker is Senior Fellow at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research.
Dr. Biersteker is an internationally renowned scholar on international relations theory and international organizations, particularly the UN. He has authored, coauthored, or edited twelve influential books, most notably State Sovereignty as Social Construct (1996), The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (2002), Targeted Sanctions: The Impacts and Effectiveness of UN Action (2016), and Informal Governance in World Politics (2024), all with Cambridge University Press. His next book, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press is titled Global Perspectives on Sanctions: Norm Contestation and its Impact on International Politics.
Dr. Biersteker is also Gasteyger Professor Honoraire at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), where he founded and directed its Global Governance Centre and served as its Director for Policy Research. Previously, he co-directed the Economics and Political Science Program at Yale University, founded and directed the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California, and directed the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, in addition to his professorial teaching appointments at these universities.
In 2002, Dr. Biersteker was made a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He co-chaired and later chaired the Global IR section of the International Studies Association from its founding in 2022 until 2024 and is currently working on The Dialectics of World Orders which explores differing conceptions of world order emanating from different regions of the world. He was awarded a Professional Achievement Award from the Alumni Association of the University of Chicago in 2020 and received the Helen Dwight Reid Award from the American Political Science Association in 1978.
He received his PhD and MS in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 and 1974, respectively, and his BA in Public Affairs from the University of Chicago in 1972.