Anne-Marie Slaughter

Anne-Marie Slaughter '80, the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs, has served as Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University since September 2002. In 2007-08 she spent 10 months on sabbatical with her family in Shanghai and traveled widely in northeast and southeast Asia.

Slaughter came to the Wilson School from Harvard Law School where she was the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law and Director of the International Legal Studies Program. Educated at Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard in both international law and international relations, Slaughter made her name as a scholar linking the two fields and helping to launch a generation of younger scholars who are equally grounded international law and international politics.

Drawing from this rich interdisciplinary expertise, Slaughter writes and teaches broadly on national and international security, global governance and the reform of international institutions, American foreign policy, international criminal law, and transnational and transgovernnmental networks. In 2004 she published A New World Order, which identified global networks of regulators, judges and legislators as a informal and horizontal world order in contrast to the formal and hierarchical traditional international institutions. Her most recent book is The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (Basic 2007), which set forth a set of foreign policy principles based on the traditional American values of liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith. She is also the convener and academic co-chair of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi-year, bipartisan research project that issued its final report in September 2006: “Forging a World of Liberty under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century,” which Slaughter co-authored with Princeton Professor John Ikenberry and which has been influential in contributing ideas to the foreign policy platforms of the presidential candidates for the 2008 election. More recently, Slaughter was a lead author on the Phoenix Initiative’s report, “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy.” The Phoenix Initiative is a group of 10 Democratic foreign policy experts seeking to rethink how America can lead in the 21st century.

Slaughter is a frequent contributor to national and international news media, including op-eds for all major newspapers, essays for National Public Radio, appearances on Anderson Cooper, the Colbert Report, CBS, NBC and PBS. She gives over 75 speeches a year to academic audiences and civic groups. She blogs for Huffpost and for TPMCafe, as well as regular invited posts. She has also served on several national commissions, most recently the Congressional sponsored commission on U.S.-U.N. Relations and the War Powers Commission chaired by former secretaries of state James Baker and Warren Christoper.

Slaughter is a former President of the American Society of International Law and currently serves on the boards of a number of organizations, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the New America Foundation, and the Center for International Governance Innovation; she is also a member of the Citigroup Economic and Political Strategies Advisory Group. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among other honors, Slaughter gave a set of Millennial Lectures at the Hague Academy of International Law in 2000 and won the Francis Deak Prize awarded by the American Journal of International Law in 1990 and 1994. She won the Jefferson Medal in Law, awarded by the University of Virginia, in 2007.

Slaughter was raised in Charlottesville, Virginia by her American father and Belgian mother. She graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1980 where she majored in the Woodrow Wilson School and received a certificate in European cultural studies. She won the Daniel M. Sachs Memorial Scholarship, one of Princeton's top honors, which provides for two years of study at Oxford University. She received her M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees in international relations from Oxford in 1982 and 1992, respectively, and her law degree from Harvard Law School, cum laude, in 1985. She continued at Harvard after graduation as a researcher for her academic mentor, the distinguished international lawyer Abram Chayes. Before joining the Harvard faculty she taught at the University of Chicago Law School. Follow Slaughter on Twitter @SlaughterAM.