Thursday, October 16, 2025
4-5:15 PM
Ingraham Hall, Room 206
Sam Hirst teaches the history of international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. His first book, Against the Liberal Order, came out with Oxford University Press in 2024. Currently, he is working on a second project about international responses to American economic hegemony in the aftermath of World War II. Before moving to Turkey, where he has taught for nearly 10 years, he taught for four years in Russia and for one year in Kazakhstan. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.
Hirst’s lecture will offer an overview of Against the Liberal Order, which is a history of interactions between the interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey that documents a distinctly state-led international politics. As they explored joint measures to accelerate development, Bolshevik and Kemalist elites gradually arrived at a statist alternative to liberal internationalism. Their improvisations reveal much about the international politics of the interwar period, and their solutions prefigured Moscow’s outreach to states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the Cold War and beyond.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History and the Karpat Center for Turkish Studies.