Alexander Wendt is Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1989. Wendt taught previously at Yale University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Chicago, before coming to OSU in 2004.

Wendt is interested in philosophical aspects of social science, with special reference to international relations. He is most well-known for his work on constructivism in world politics, including Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, 1999), which received the International Studies Association’s “Best Book of the Decade” award in 2006. 

In 2017 Wendt was named the most influential scholar in International Relations over the past 20 years in a TRIP survey of 1400 IR faculty.

And in 2023, for their contributions to constructivism Wendt and Martha Finnemore were awarded the prestigious Skytte Prize in Political Science.

In his more recent work, Quantum Mind and Social Science (Cambridge, 2015) and beyond, Wendt explores some implications for social science of the finding that the Kahneman-Tversky anomalies in rational decision-making can all be resolved if quantum theory is used as a baseline rather than an expected-utility model based on classical probability theory. If the human mind is actually a quantum phenomenon, that could revolutionize today’s classical social sciences in the same way that quantum theory did physics in the 1920s. 

Taking a short break from quantum, Wendt is currently writing a book on UAP and human security, in light of the 2021 Pentagon Report confirming that UAP (formerly “UFOs”) are real and a “potential threat to national security.” 

For a useful introduction to Wendt’s quantum work see the interview below.