In a time when multilateral cooperation faces significant challenges, the latest installment of the Let’s Talk Democracy series will explore how diplomacy and the rule of law can be strengthened. From conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza to potential tensions over Taiwan, the discussion will examine how the principle of “might makes right” can be resisted in favor of peace, justice, and stability.
Join Samuel Moyn (Yale University), an expert in constitutional and international law, and Alexander Görlach, journalist and adjunct professor of democratic theory at NYU Gallatin School, as they reflect on the state of the post-World War II international order.
Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College. His forthcoming book is Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Hoard Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It, scheduled to appear from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 2026. Trained in modern European intellectual history, he works on political and legal thought in modern times and on constitutional and international law in historical and current perspective. His most recent book is Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford. Currently he is working on (different) projects constitutionalism and democracy, legal theory, and the Vietnam war. Mr. Moyn is a fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Over the years he has written in venues such as the Atlantic, Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Dissent, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
Alexander Görlach is an adjunct professor to NYU Gallatin School where he teaches democratic theory. Prior to that he had various positions as visiting scholar and as fellow at Harvard University in the United States, and Cambridge University and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He is a senior fellow to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York and a senior advisor to the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles. Dr. Görlach holds a ThD in comparative religion and a PhD in linguistics. His academic interests include democratic theory, politics and religion, and theories of secularism, pluralism and cosmopolitanism. In the academic year 2017-18 he was a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University and City University Hongkong.
Since then he focuses on the rise of China and what it means for the democracies in East Asia. Dr. Görlach is an honorary professor of ethics and theology at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany. Alexander Görlach is the founder of the debate-magazine The European, that he also ran as its editor in chief from 2009 to 2015. Today he serves as an op-ed contributor to the New York Times, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and the South China Morning Post. He is a columnist to the business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Deutsche Welle and Focus Online. He is a frequent commentator on German News Channel WeLT TV.
