Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service

When the opportunity arose to come to SFS as the Peter F. Krogh Assistant Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice, Erik Voeten did not hesitate. “Simply put, I had the highest respect for the faculty and the faculty told me how great the students were. I had always wanted to work in an inter-disciplinary setting, as my research and teaching interests are in political science, law, and economics, so SFS was a great fit.”

At SFS, Voeten teaches courses on international organizations, global governance, and international relations theory and practice. He is currently focusing on two projects dealing with international courts, research that stems from his lifelong interest in group decision-making. “I have always been fascinated by the ways that different people with different interests are able to decide on a collective course of action. This has led me to investigate the United Nations, the Human Rights Council, the international courts, and the European Parliament, to name a few.”

Voeten maintains a website that aggregates data from various scholars researching international courts, including his own data on the European Court of Human Rights. “It’s fascinating to examine how diplomats or judges from different cultures and states with different interests behave when they need to come to an agreement, especially when we consider the anarchic environment in which these institutions operate,” he remarks. “Many of these institutions hold considerable promise for improving not only relations between states, but improving the human condition. Unfortunately, this promise is not always realized. If we want to improve these institutions we first need to understand how they do and don’t work.”

Voeten did his undergraduate studies at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, going on to receive his Ph.D. from Princeton University in political science. Afterwards, he received a post-doctoral fellowship from Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. For more on his research, please visit his website at: http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/ev42.

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