Rawi Abdelal is the Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management at Harvard Business School. He served as Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies from 2015 to 2022.
His primary expertise is international political economy, and his research focuses on the politics of globalization and the political economy of Eurasia. Professor Abdelal's first book, National Purpose in the World Economy, won the 2002 Shulman Prize as the outstanding book on the international relations of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Abdelal's second book, Capital Rules, explains the evolution of the social norms and legal rules of the international financial system. Abdelal has also edited or co-edited three books: The Rules of Globalization, a collection of Harvard Business School cases on international business; Measuring Identity; and Constructing the International Economy.
Abdelal is currently at work on two projects. One project, The Fragile State of the World, explores the inter-related challenges that undermined the first era of globalization, circa 1870-1914, and which threaten to destroy the current age of global capitalism. The second project, The Profits of Power, explores the geopolitics of energy in Europe and Eurasia.
In 1999 Abdelal earned a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University, where he had received an M.A. in 1997. At Cornell Abdelal's dissertation won the Kahin Prize in International Relations and the Esman Prize. He was a President's Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he received a B.S. with highest honors in Economics in 1993. Recent honors include Harvard Business School's Greenhill Award, Apgar Award for innovation in teaching, and Williams Award for excellence in teaching, as well as, on several occasions, the Student Association's Faculty Award for outstanding teaching.
