On April 14-5, 2023, a group of eminent scholars and practitioners gathered at Princeton University to explore ways to strengthen and rebuild the open, rules-based international order. In the shadow of the COVID pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine, they searched for “first principles” and reform ideas for twenty-first century global governance architecture, focusing in particular on rules and institutions for the world economy and great power security cooperation.

You may download the full statement of the Princeton Principles here.

The Principles are signed by G. John Ikenberry (Princeton University), Harold James (Princeton University), and Oliver Letwin (King’s College London). In addition to the signatories, Ralph Arezhi (Harvard Kennedy School), Markus Brunnermeier (Princeton University), Robert Cooper (European University Institute), Marta Dassu (The Aspen Institute, Italy), Sergei Guriev (Sciences Po), Oona Hathaway (Yale University), Qingguo Jia (Peking University), Isabel Letwin (Lawyer), Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Princeton University), Gideon Rachman (Financial Times), Patrick Stewart (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Anne-Marie Slaughter (New America Foundation), Matias Spektor (FGV Brazil), and Marie Yovanovitch (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) joined the deliberations.

Anatoly Levshin (Princeton University), Woojeong Jang (Princeton University), and Molly Kiniry (Cambridge University) served as the rapporteurs for these deliberations. 

The meeting was jointly sponsored by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the School for Public and International Affairs, the Bendheim Center for Finance, and the Project for Peaceful Competition.