Michael W. Doyle is University Professor at Columbia University, where he is affiliated with the School of International and Public Affairs, department of political science, and the law school. He received his BA and PhD in political science from Harvard University and has previously taught at the University of Warwick, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and Yale University.

Doyle’s career has joined scholarship and international public service. Well known for his theory of the liberal democratic peace (“democracies do not go to war with each other”), he is the author of books including The Question of Intervention: John Stuart Mill and the Responsibility to Protect; Liberal Peace; Ways of War and Peace; U.N. Peacekeeping in Cambodia: UNTAC’s Civil Mandate; and Striking First: Preemption and Prevention in International Conflict. His new book, Cold Peace (W.W. Norton, 2023), is a study of the origins (and how to mitigate) a new Cold War between the United States and its allies, and with Russia and China.

From 2006 to 2013, Doyle was an individual member and then the chair of the UN Democracy Fund, established in 2005 by the UN General Assembly to promote grass-roots democratization around the world. He previously served as assistant secretary-general and special adviser for policy planning to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. His responsibilities in the Secretary-General’s Executive Office included strategic planning (including the “Millennium Development Goals”), outreach to the international corporate sector (the “Global Compact’), and relations with Washington.

Doyle has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and has received the Charles Merriam Award of the American Political Science Association. In 2011, he received APSA’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award; in 2012, he was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science.