Andrew Wiliams

I was educated at the Universities of Keele and Geneva (Graduate School of International Studies) and I spent the first ten years of my academic career in Switzerland. My doctorate was in international history and looked at the relationship between the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union in the inter - war years. This later became my first book, Labour and Russia in 1989, which I followed with a study of East - West Trade, Trading with the Bolsheviks in 1992. In Geneva I helped set up an organization to practice and study international mediation. There I had close encounters with various international organizations and some multinational companies. On my return to the UK I became a lecturer in international relations at the University of Kent, where I stayed for 21 years, coming to St. Andrews in 2006. I have taught modules at both places on the study and practice of conflict and war, with a strong historical bias, if mainly to show how mistakes that are now being made have historical roots that it is vital to understand. My ambition in more recent years has been to show the historical roots of a number of key concepts in conflict and war studies, like Reconstruction, but more widely how the creation of liberal international orders has contributed to the dominance of 'liberal peace' thinking and practice in international politics since 1990. The results of that thinking have been published as books (Failed Imagination? Anglo - American New World Orders of the Twentieth Century, 1998, 2nd ed. 2007, and Liberalism and War, 2006. My aim is now to systematize much of my thinking. Hence with Roger Mac Ginty I recently published Conflict and Development (2009) which is now to be translated into Japanese. I am now working on a text book (with Amelia Hadfield and Simon Rofe) entitledInternational History, International Relations (forthcoming 2011) and a new monograph entitled France, Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century: A Reappraisal.