Professor of the History of International Relations & Director of the Centre for Geopolitics, University of Cambridge
Upcoming: Summer 2025
The ‘Great Powers’ are back. They were long thought superseded by the forces of globalisation and interdependence and made irrelevant by the challenges of civil wars, complex emergencies, and global threats such as climate change. Now, though, traditional great power rivalry between the most important states in the global system has returned with a vengeance. Today, as the world watches these tensions play out in Ukraine, and contemplates possible escalation in the Indo-Pacific, Prof Brendan Simms takes a fresh look at who the great powers are, what makes them what they are, where they came from, and how they shape the world we live in.
Brendan Simms is the founder and Director of the Centre for Geopolitics. He works on European geopolitics, past and present, and his principal interests are the German Question, Britain and Europe, Hitler’s global anti-semitism, Humanitarian Intervention and state construction. He teaches at both undergraduate and graduate level in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS); he also supervises history undergraduates at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His MPhil courses on the History of European Geopolitics use scenarios as part of the teaching and learning process. He has supervised PhD dissertations on subjects as diverse as Intervention and State Sovereignty in the Holy Roman Empire, Sinn Fein, the American colonists and the eighteenth-century European state system, the Office of the UN High Representative in Bosnia, and German Civil-Military relations. Prof Simms is a frequent contributor to print and broadsheet media. He has advised governments and parliaments, and spoken at Westminster, in the European Parliament (Brussels) and at think-tanks in the United Kingdom, the United States and in many Eurozone countries. The Centre for Geopolitics is designed to draw together all these interests.