About
Barbara Koremenos was born in Indiana (the diverse and urban Northwest part of the state), went to Kalamazoo College in Michigan, and graduate school at the University of Chicago (MPP and PhD). She therefore is a Midwesterner at heart and only lasted seven years in Southern California.
She went through college on a theater scholarship for acting. She also took a bunch of economics classes because she felt that she would learn things to help her run the family kitchen and bath business. Midway through college, her brother-in-law took over the business but, by that time, she liked economics even though it taught her nothing about kitchen and baths. Her senior year, she was offered a research assistantship at the Brookings Institution. She immediately found out what Brookings was. It was there she was first introduced to theories of political economy and heavy-duty politics.
She now draws on her economics background and her interest in politics and goes around arguing that international agreements and institutions are consequential and their specific design features are, in great part, what make them stable and hence consequential. She uses economic methodology to show that their features vary in systematic and important ways and are deserving of focused research. Like scholars in international law, she takes seriously the actual provisions and details of international agreements and organizations. However, she goes beyond the descriptive work that characterizes much of international law to show theoretically that the careful choice of these provisions makes international cooperation both more likely and more robust.
She is the second political scientist ever to receive the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her project – and the first in IR. Her current projects include explaining the subnational diplomacy undertaken by the U.S. fifty states and designing solar geoengineering institutions that incentivize mitigation rather than discourage it. Her journal publications include American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Legal Studies, Law and Contemporary Problems, Rationality and Society, and Review of International Organizations. Koremenos has served on two National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committees and one American Academy of Arts and Sciences panel using her expertise to shed light on international law and norms frameworks, medicine regulation, and international health cooperation for future pandemics. She regularly consulted for the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government from 2019-2024.
Selected Publications
- “Cooperation Failure or Secret Collusion? Absolute Monarchs and Informal Cooperation,” Review of International Organizations, forthcoming (with Melissa Carlson).
- The Continent of International Law: Explaining Agreement Design, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
- “The Role of State Leadership in the Incidence of International Cooperation,” Global Policy 6(3): 237–246, September 2015.
- “What’s Left Out and Why? Informal Provisions within Formal International Law,” Review of International Organizations, Vol. 8, 2: 137-62, June 2013.
- Koremenos, B., If Only Half of International Agreements Have Dispute Resolution Provisions, Which Half Needs Explaining? The journal of legal studies, 2007. 36(1): p. 189.
- Koremenos, B., Contracting around International Uncertainty. The American Political Science Review, 2005. 99(4): p. 549.
Courses Taught
- Intersection of International Law and International Relations (graduate)
- International Law and Cooperation (graduate)
- Public International Law (undergraduate)
Affiliation(s)
- Center for Political Studies
Field(s) of Study
- International Law and Institutions
- Political Economy
- Public Policy and Administration
