Michael Doyle is joint-appointment to the Law School and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia Univeristy. As the Harold Brown Professor of United States Foreign and Security Policy, Doyle brought a strong reputation as a writer and thinker on the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism and other philosophies of international governance.

An interest in international affairs came naturally to Doyle, whose parents met in the counter intelligence corps during World War II and whose father served in embassies in Europe. Born in Hawaii, he grew up in France and Switzerland. Before coming to Columbia, he was a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, though for two years he was on leave to work as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's special advisor.

Although he was trained as a political scientist, Prof. Doyle comes with scholarly experience in the legal field. A former teaching assistant of the late Leo Gross – an eminent professor of international law at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy – Doyle says that understanding international law and policy is more important than it has been in several generations, if not ever. “During the Cold War, the international system was divided into two hostile blocs, with very little cooperation between them,” he says. “Today, we're entering a world that is vastly more complicated and confusing, and in some cases full of conflict, but the room for multilateral agreement is much larger.”