Jeremy Adelman
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Jeremy Adelman is the Director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and Academic Director of the Open Society University. His most recent books include Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (Princeton University Press, 2013), Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of Humankind from Origins to the Present (W. W. Norton, 7th edition, 2024), and the forthcoming Making the Modern World: A History of Love and Fear (Princeton University Press).
Jeremy Adelman joins the Paris IAS in December 2025 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Contemporary world history; globalization; violence; human rights.
Civil Wars and the New World Order, 1979-1994
Small countries on the edge of the world's great powers have often been footnotes in the narratives about the making of world orders and disorders. And yet, extremes and edges reveal facets of how systems are made and remade that are often overlooked and obscured by the focus on cores of concentrated power. What would the narrative of the end of the Cold War and the dawn of globalization look like if the extremes and edges were not just integrated into the plot, but the focus of attention and action?
This project examines how contexts of extreme political violence and economic decomposition -- civil wars -- functioned as magnets for international actors that played important roles in negotiating the end of the Cold War and laying the groundwork for the system of distributed governance called "globalization." Now that the cycle of post-Cold War globalization appears to be ending, this project takes a retrospect look at its origins. This retrospective does not start from the commanding heights of Washington, Moscow, or Berlin or Beijing, but from the jungles and urban borderlands where insurgents and counter-insurgents waged bloody civil wars in El Salvador, Sri Lanka, and Lebanon.
How did the extreme forces of sub-national violence affect supra-national history? By mediating civil wars, international forces became actors in local development and peacemaking. In so doing, extreme violence internalized external actors and metabolized them. Diplomats, journalists, aid workers, investors, and activists saw their work resignified and the purpose transform. Experiences on the edge, like reporting truths about atrocity, brokering ends to armed conflict, and recasting economic dependency changed the course of local wars and the identities of external actors. Specifically, the meanings of human security and peace changed in powerful ways and framed the international imaginary as Cold War tensions thawed and the United Nations emerged as a forum for rethinking interdependence.
Key publications
Jeremy Adelman. Making the Modern World: A History of Love and Fear, Princeton University Press, forthcoming.
Jeremy Adelman. Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of Humankind from Origins to the Present, W. W. Norton, 7th edition, 2024.
Jeremy Adelman. Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman, Princeton University Press, 2013.
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