Department of Politics at Princeton University

Robert Gilpin is a scholar of international political economy and the professor emeritus of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He holds the Eisenhower professorship. Gilpin specializes in political economy and international relations, especially the effect of multinational corporations on state autonomy.

Following three years as an officer in the U.S. Navy, Gilpin completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his doctorate in 1960. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1962 and earned tenure in 1967. He was a faculty associate of the Center for International Studies, and the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination.

Gilpin was a Guggenheim fellow in 1969, a Rockefeller fellow from 1967–68 and again from 1976–1977, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the American Political Science Association, for which he served as vice president from 1984–1985, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Gilpin describes his view of international relations and international political economy from a realist standpoint, explaining in his book Global Political Economy that he considers himself a 'state-centric realist' in the tradition of prominent 'classical' realists such as E.H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau. Gilpin's present research interests are in the application of realist thinking to contemporary American policies in the Middle East. Gilpin was openly critical of the politics surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq in his essay titled 'War is too important to be left to ideological amateurs'.