2012
Helen V. Milner
Princeton University
(2012-2014)
Helen V. Milner (born 1958) is an American political scientist and the B.C. Forbes Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and the Director of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1986, following an M.A. in 1982 at the same department.
Before joining Princeton, Prof. Milner taught at Columbia University from 1986 to 2004. She held the James T. Shotwell Professorship of International Relations from 2001 to 2004 and previously served as Assistant Professor (1986–1989), Associate Professor (1989–1995), and Professor (1995–2004) in the Department of Political Science.
She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. She has written extensively on issues related to international and comparative political economy, the connections between domestic politics and foreign policy, globalization and regionalism, and the relationship between democracy and trade policy. She was also President of the International Studies Association from 2020 to 2021.
She works on topics related to globalization and development, such as the political economy of foreign aid, the "digital divide" and the global diffusion of the internet, and the relationship between globalization and democracy. Her research in these areas concerns Africa, in particular, the politics of foreign aid in Uganda and Ghana, and the resource curse associated with non-tax income in such countries. She also looks at how globalization interacts with political change in Tunisia in another branch of research.
Prof. Milner’s books include Climate Fault Lines: The Political Economy of a Warming World (co-authored with Alexander F. Gazmararian, Princeton University Press, 2024); Votes, Vetoes, and the Political Economy of International Trade Agreements (co-authored with E. Mansfield, Princeton University Press, 2012); Power, Interdependence, and Nonstate Actors in World Politics (co-edited with A. Moravcsik, Princeton University Press, 2009); The International Library of Writings on the New Global Economy (general editor of multi-volume series, Edward Elgar, 2002-2003); Political Science: The State of the Discipline III (co-edited with Ira Katznelson, W.W. Norton & Company, 2002); Resisting Protectionism: Global Industries and the Politics of International Trade (Princeton University Press, 1988); and Interests, Institutions and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (Princeton University Press, 1997). Sailing the Water’s Edge: Domestic Politics and American Foreign Policy (co-authored with Dustin Tingley, Princeton University Press, 2015) won the 2016 Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book published in the field of U.S. national policy.
Prof. Milner served as IPSA Vice-President from 2007 to 2009 and as First Vice-President from 2010–2012 before serving as IPSA President from 2012 to 2014. Prof. Helen V. Milner and Prof. Marianne Kneuer (also an IPSA Past President) co-edited the volume Political Science and Digitalization – Global Perspectives (Barbara Budrich, 2019). The book originated from the mid-term IPSA conference Political Science in the Digital Age: Mapping Opportunities, Perils and Uncertainties, held in December 2017 in Hannover, Germany, where Prof. Kneuer and Prof. Milner served as Program Co-chairs. The book provides valuable insights into digitalization and examines the challenges it poses for the discipline of political science.
