Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service.

Daniel Nexon’s academic work covers a range of subjects, most notably international-relations theory, international order, U.S. foreign policy, and power politics. The primary focus of his scholarship is on “international hierarchy”: the dynamics of empires, hegemonic powers, confederations, and other logics of international and transnational governance.

Professor Nexon— along with his frequent co-author, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson — was an early and influential advocate of relational approaches to the study of world politics

His first book, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010. His second book, Exit from Hegemony: The Unravelling of American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-authored with Alex Cooley, explores the contentious politics of international order. He is co-editor of Undermining American Hegemon: Goods Substitution in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Harry Potter and International Relations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

He has held fellowships at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010, he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. From 2014-2018, he was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly.

Nexon has also written for such non-academic outlets as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic.

He helped coordinate a volunteer foreign-policy group for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. He remains interested in how progressives should think about — and pursue — foreign policy.

Nexon co-hosts a podcast, with Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, called “Whiskey and International Relations Theory,” which is pretty much what it sounds like, and contributes to two group weblogs: Lawyers, Guns and Money and The Duck of Minerva. He spends too much time on social media: he can be found (for now) on Twitter and on Mastodon.