Joseph Nye

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Joseph S. Nye, Jr. (born 1937) is the co-founder, along with Robert Keohane, of the international relations theory neoliberalism developed in their 1977 book Power and Interdependence. Together with Keohane, he developed the concepts of asymmetrical and complex interdependence. They also explored transnational relations and world politics in an edited volume in the 1970s. More recently, he pioneered the theory of soft power.

Nye is currently University Distinguished Service Professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and previously served as dean there. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Princeton University and, after studying PPE as a Rhodes Scholar at Exeter College at Oxford University, obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard. He attended Morristown Prep (now the Morristown-Beard School) in Morristown, NJ and graduated in 1954.

Nye has published many works in recent years, the most recent of which being Understanding International Conflicts, 6th ed (2006), The Power Game: A Washington Novel (2004), Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), and The Paradox of American Power (2002). Nye coined the term soft power in the late 1980s and it first came into widespread usage following a piece he wrote in Foreign Policy in the early 1990s.

Nye also served as Deputy to the Undersecretary of State in the Carter Administration, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Clinton Administration, and was considered by many to be the preferred choice for National Security Advisor in the 2004 presidential campaign of John Kerry. He is widely recognized as one of the foremost liberal thinkers on foreign policy, and is seen by some as the counter to renowned Harvard conservative Samuel P. Huntington.

In 2005, Nye was voted one of the ten most influential scholars of international relations.[1]

Nye is on the Advisory board of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy as well as on the International Editorial Board of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, the editorial board of Foreign Policy, the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has been awarded the Woodrow Wilson Prize by Princeton University and the Humphrey Prize by the American Political Science Association. In 2005, he was awarded the Honorary Patronage of the University Philosophical Society of Trinity College Dublin.

Nye and his wife, Molly Harding Nye, have three adult sons.[2]