The limits of normative liberalism in international relations

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

In the framework of the SPS International Relations seminar, this lecture features a discussion with Professor Mark Gilbert (Johns Hopkins University).

Twenty years ago, political theorists and scholars of international relations believed that the world was heading towards a cosmopolitan future. One where the ‘international community’ operated according to shared norms, supranational institutions, and prescriptive liberal values, especially human rights. Sovereign right was increasingly presumed to be conditional on good conduct by national leaders, not a function of territorial control. Via a discussion of Mill, Kant, E.H. Carr, and Robert Cooper, and a reflection on the debate in the early 2000s over the EU’s significance, the lecture suggests that liberals urgently need to rethink their conception of the global order.  

Speaker: Mark Gilbert is C. Grove Haines Professor of history at SAIS Europe, the Bologna centre of the Johns Hopkins University. He was educated (B.A. hons Politics, 1983) at Durham University and was awarded a PhD in contemporary history by the University of Wales (1990). Before joining SAIS, he was associate professor in contemporary history and international studies at the University of Trento and lecturer in European studies at the University of Bath. He began his academic career as assistant professor of political science at Dickinson College. Gilbert has been Associate Editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies since 2015. He served as Chair of the 2018 Cundill Prize and as a member of the international jury for the 2025 Laura Shannon Prize. His latest book, Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy (Penguin/Allen Lane, Rizzoli and W.W. Norton), was shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize in January 2025 and was awarded the Helen and Howard Marraro Prize for Italian History by the American Historical Association on 15 October 2025. It was published by Penguin in paperback in June 2025.