Political Science was not an obvious career choice.” With roots in California, the apolitical atmosphere of what used to be called Santa Clara Valley, and with a mom who emphasized that politics was not a topic for discussion in “polite company,” her life might have gone in any number of alternative directions. Law was one possibility, until her undergraduate advisor at the University of Redlands mentioned the rote quality of the L1 year and the relative creativity of PhD research. “That turned my head,” she recalls. But toward what? A post-graduate Rotary fellowship year in the Philippines right out of college prompted thoughts of studying in the South Pacific or Southeast Asia. Determined to force some kind of meaningful choice, she applied to only two PhD programs: the University of Hawai’i (in Geography) and Harvard (in Government).
Many of us choose political science teaching and research with great deliberation. For Simmons, the process was more organic. The Philippines experience exposed her to international relations at a time when the century long American military presence was starting to lose support. It also exposed the extreme inequality that would eventually spark her interest in international political economy. A Fulbright year in London turned her focus in the opposite direction, toward the international financial system and the systemic issues of international borrowing and debt. Things were starting to come into focus. The politics of international economic relations drew her to Cambridge, Massachusetts over the Pacific.
What do these opening paragraphs suggest? First, politics was not in Simmons’ blood. It was piqued and prodded by a set of encounters. Second, there is no single academic lodestar that guides Simmons’ research. You will see this from her work. From political economy to international law; from human rights to international borders, Simmons’ research and teaching have extraordinary range. Even the how of research –the tools of the trade– have ranged from archival to interview based to observational to (more recently) experimental. At the same time, there is a certain modesty when she answers students wanting to know her opinion that, “Nobody cares what I think. They only care what I can show.” Within these limits, Simmons has managed to spearhead some of the most impressive research agendas in the study of international politics, from policy diffusion to law compliance to border hardening. She is not, as Tanja Börzel says, a “one-trick pony”; instead, she has an “awe-inspiring” capacity to impact a wide array of disciplines.
“I care more about an important finding than the tools used to dig it up.”
Summarizing Beth Simmons’ contributions to the field of political science is no small feat, given their wide breadth and complexity. Like all great political scientists, she brings the useful abstractions of theory to bear upon the complexities of reality. Unlike many, however, she avoids doing so in a way which clings dogmatically to a single argument, approach, or orientation. As Kathryn Sikkink remarks, there are few scholars of comparable stature “who have so little of a theoretical or even ideational axe to grind.” Instead, her work has constantly evolved in ways which demonstrate a unique and creative theoretical eye. The reason that Simmons has remained constantly relevant is that her political science always pairs rigorous theory with poorly understood or overlooked but emerging topics. There is clear value in such research. And while Simmons may not be theoretically or ideologically dogmatic, her work is not neutral. She has maintained an unflinching focus on the moral rights and wrongs committed in international politics, as her most famous work on mobilization made clear. This too, continues to resonate at a time when the human rights agenda is active and contested in equal measure.
Photo Caption: President Beth A. Simmons at the APSA Annual Meeting 2025
A final thread tying together Simmons’ teaching and research: she manages to speak clearly to moments of flux in the international system, whether it’s the collapse of economic regimes, the rapid diffusion of new ones, the proliferation of human rights protections, or the “return” of border politics. That we happen to live in such a moment only brings to light the utility of her research agenda(s) for academics and practitioners alike.
BEGINNINGS IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
The first degreed stop in Simmons’ graduate career was at the University of Chicago’s Committee on International Relations, where she recalls being most influenced by Charles Lipson. “He was my first exposure to International Political Economy and Institutions.” At the time, the international debt crisis loomed large. Lipson had just published Standing Guard, about protecting foreign direct investment in the nineteenth century. Why not something similar in the bond market? Drawing on regime theory, she wrote a master’s thesis on the “regime” (a slight abuse of the term) relating to enforcing international bond defaults in a period of British “hegemony.” Though not fully committed to training for the marathon of a PhD, and with a thought of developing something more “contemporary,” Simmons applied “at large” for a Fulbright to study debt in the interwar years. For the British this was international history, not political science. For Simmons there was no bright line. She spent the year in the archives at Kew, the Bank of England, Baring Brothers, and the New York Fed. Her “history” was eventually published in World Politics.
All this drifting revealed the joy of researching. Ready to commit to the marathon, Simmons enrolled in the PhD program in government at Harvard UniversityFootnote 1. She entered during a time of structural change in the international system. The United States was in a decade of relative decline, and within another decade, the Cold War would draw to a close. Theories of international politics were predicting instability “after hegemony”Footnote 2 when she started and were celebrating the “unipolar moment”Footnote 3 when she was done. “These shifts were moving targets,” Simmons recalls, noting classmates who had invested years in understanding the balance of conventional power in Europe only to see their research obsolesce in real time. She wrote her dissertation, advised by Robert Keohane, James Alt, and Stephan Haggard. For Simmons, the past was more valuable than ever. She embraced the interwar years, this time as a case study in systemic shifts constrained by domestic political coalitions that had ruptured after the First World War.
In the meantime, together with Stephan Haggard, she published “Theories of International Regimes” in International Organization, a piece which provided a critical review of the burgeoning research on international regimes at the time. It was not backward-looking, however. On the contrary, the authors proved to be well ahead of their time, as evidenced by the piece’s lasting appeal. “Both of us were at early stages of our careers,” recalls Stephan Haggard, “but we wanted to pull the discussion of regimes back toward domestic politics and political economy. As it turned out, those themes resonated through both of our careers.” Haggard added, “That piece is still in the top three or four of my citations…amazing it stuck around.” According to Google Scholar its annual citation count peaked in 2017, three decades after the original publication.
Not only is the piece an insightful and enjoyable read, but it also previews the trajectory of Simmons’ future work. The authors provide an enthusiastic and measured account of existing research, but their dissatisfaction of status quo theorizing was palpable. Theories of international regimes might have rescued the “societal” dimension of international relations from the “lingering taint of idealism” but it also “unfortunately reverts” to a realist tendency toward treating states as unified rational actors pursuing narrow conceptions of national interest. In other words, the authors were identifying one of the many theoretical blind spots Simmons would ultimately bring into focus over the course of her career.
Meanwhile, her dissertation would do exactly this in the field of international political economy. Simmons was writing at a time when two things were clear: that domestic politics were shaping the trajectory of international relations, and doing so rapidly and unpredictably. Ironically, these conditions meant that looking forward required looking backward to the political economy of Europe just as it was approaching the Second World War. As Simmons puts it herself: “At the time I was writing, everything was changing, but the past was fixed. The interwar years were the interwar years.” Old coalitions crumbled. New ones were shaping international affairs, as new groups gained political salience. The theme of Who Adjusts? was that there was no putting the prewar world economy back together on the same terms (The parallels with the current moment do not need restating.)
But international relations were also bearing upon Simmons much more directly during the writing process. Robert Keohane recalls an outstanding student with great tenacity but also one who was navigating the often-difficult balance of personal and professional life. Her mother died suddenly nine months before finishing her dissertation. Her husband, Bruce was deployed to Iraq in 1991 and Simmons was experiencing a difficult time finding a quiet time and a quiet space to complete the dissertation.Footnote 4 Keohane, as chair of the department at the time, had access to two offices; he handed the key of one to Simmons. “Hide yourself out,” he said. “Write your dissertation. She did, and she did brilliantly.” Simmons, he added, like all great students had a keen penchant for addressing important problems with a rigorous methodological orientation. Keohane, like all great advisors, was attentive to the needs of his students. Beth has repeatedly acknowledged her luck that Keohane moved to Harvard just as she was starting her dissertation, saying “It is impossible to imagine a more affirming and constructive mentor.” Keohane, too, acknowledged that he may have left a theoretical imprint on Simmons, but he credited her methodological rigor to others an amusingly modest comment coming from a co-author of the single most widely read political science methods text.
Who Adjusts: Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy During the Interwar Years was published during Simmons’ time as an assistant professor at Duke University, which was, according to Beth, “one of the most supportive departments in the country to be a junior faculty in the 1990s.” As chair at the time, John Aldrich granted two years for Simmons to take up appointments at the United States Institute of Peace and the International Monetary Fund. Duke appointed her as a “faculty presence” for a first-year dorm, which proved essential for her professional progress. With her husband then commanding what would be the last US battalion in Panama and a three-month-old baby Charles, she recounted a story in which the freshman students had kindly agreed to babysit while she ran errands. When she returned, she found a committee of babysitters gathered around baby Charles, crawling on a billiards table.
“Duke made it possible. You just make do.”
While “making do” Who Adjusts was published by Princeton University Press. The book demonstrates why black boxing states miss the constraints on international politics. Even if states wanted to cooperate by abiding to the gold standard, and even if this suited a narrow conception of the national interest, domestic political support had shifted decisively. Through a combination of cross-national data analysis and in-depth case studies, Simmons shows that currency devaluation stems from capital flight with roots in a government’s credibility problem, requiring that countries adjust their policies, but they did so in different ways based on domestic political considerations. Left-wing states tended to depreciate and reduce protection, while right-wing governments defended their currencies but opted for protection. The pre-war Gold Standard could not survive these interwar political coalitions.
The resulting book did not go unnoticed to say the least, winning the American Political Science Association’s 1995 Woodrow Wilson Award (now called the Merze Tate–Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Award) for the best book published in the United States on government, politics, or international affairs, and the APSA Political Economy Section Award for Best Book published in the three years prior. In his review at the time, David Lake called it “One of the best books I have read in years” and one which “not only sets a new standard of research excellence, but is required reading for all international political economists, as well as many comparativists and historians.”
Who Adjusts may have been the first blind spot Simmons identified in political economy, but it was hardly the last. After joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, Simmons established a particularly fruitful collaboration with Zachary Elkins, one of her students and now professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin. The two addressed the rapid diffusion of economic liberalism in the post-Cold War era. The spatial diffusion of policies—something that was conventionally treated as a problem of spatial non-independence, something to be modeled, not theorized—was instead shown to unfold predictably as a function of unfolding political information and interests. “This was an eye-opening collaboration for me,” according to Elkins. “Beth and I were looking at different kinds of phenomena when we started working together. We could see that policies cluster in time and space, and we just wanted to figure out how and why they were connected.” The idea of diffusion has a powerful purchase not only on liberalization, as Simmons and Elkins framed it, but has also been used to analyze the diffusion of illiberality globally as well.
INTERNATIONAL LAW AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Simmons’ contributions are not limited to political economy, of course. Early in her early career she had established herself as a leading figure in international relations more generally. It was this expertise that attracted the attention of Walter Carlsnaes and Thomas Risse, who invited Simmons aboard to co-edit the now widely read Handbook of International Relations. Risse recalled not hearing back from Simmons after about a week following their initial invite:
We started musing about “arrogant Americans” who don’t even bother to reply to emails from colleagues outside the US. After a week or so, however, we received the following email (not a verbatim quote…): “Dear Professors, I am sorry that it took me so long to reply to your email, but I gave birth yesterday.” Of course, Beth came on board as co-editor and we have been close friends ever since.Footnote 5
Meanwhile, from her intellectual roots in international cooperation, Simmons’ interest was growing in the role of international law, which was notably absent from the regime’s literature of the 1980s. IR theory at the time, dominated by especially spare approaches to realism, tended to ignore law altogether. Her interest in international law in international relations was not shared by a whole range of skeptics. Eventually, international regimes theorists would see the usefulness of researching law, but according to Simmons, neither political scientists nor, ironically, legal scholars, were enamored. Some of the skepticism was not unmerited, especially at a time when political scientists were still struggling (as they continue to do) to develop strong empirical work to tackle the issues of selection bias and causal inference. Many legal scholars didn’t think international law was law (properly understood). Beth relates one student-initiated incident that ended up impacting her research direction. Her first year teaching, four weeks into her international law class, a front-row Duke undergraduate student in a ROTC uniform earnestly asked, “Professor Simmons, what is the use of any of this international law stuff?” Simmons was stumped. “Why didn’t I have an answer? I decided that was the real-world question that my next book should tackle.”
That is the spark that fueled Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics. Originally, it was to be an ambitious project on the role of law in the governance of money, trade, territorial conflicts, and human rights. While she did eventually publish in all of these areas, Mobilizing had a singular focus. Seeking undergraduate research assistants at Berkeley, she received scores of applications, 95% of which specified human rights as their primary interest. Students helped her to see the compelling need for understanding the role of international law on human rights chances. Despite the absence of strong theory in international relations to explain why states should engage internationally regarding the rights of other states’ (and their own) citizens.
This puzzle narrowed Simmons’ interests in the role of international law in shaping the possibilities for better human rights practices around the world. When she returned to Harvard in a faculty position her research and teaching focused on international human rights law, culminating in the publication of Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics. In it, Simmons comprehensively dispels the notion that international law is feckless in shaping human rights practices. Gino Pauselli, a human rights expert and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, nicely summarizes these contributions: “Her scholarship fundamentally reframed how we think about international human rights law. At a moment when realist theories about ’toothless’ treaties dominated, she showed rigorously and empirically that legal commitments can produce real changes in state behavior, not through external coercion but through the activation of domestic stakeholders: nongovernmental organizations, lawyers, courts, and citizens who use treaty ratification as leverage.”
Many people agree with Pauselli. With the publication of Mobilizing for Human Rights, Simmons won APSA’s Woodrow Wilson Award (again), the International Studies Association’s Best Book Award in international studies, the Stein Rokkan Prize, and the American Society for International Law’s Certificate of Merit for a Preeminent Contribution to Creative Scholarship. As Pauselli notes, “On the methodological front, she brought systematic, large-N empirical analysis to a field based largely on legal and qualitative grounds. Her work reshaped how scholars across subfields think about the relationship between international norms, domestic politics, and state behavior.”
With Mobilizing for Human Rights as example and inspiration, Simmons developed a huge set of collaborations that poked, prodded, and extended the ideas contained in Mobilizing. With Anton Strezhnev and Judith Kelley, she methodologically scrutinizes arguments about unintended negative consequences of human rights law, arguing that claims of negative consequences of international human rights law bear the same evidentiary burden as do claims about positive effects (though they typically do not meet this burden). With Richard Nielsen she shows that States are not induced to ratify treaties just because they are pressured by tangible benefits or just to glean praise from other states. And with Cosette Creamer she theorizes the specific processes through which human rights self-reporting processes can enact change.
In a related but distinct vein, Simmons has also written, with Hyeran Jo, about a much-maligned international human rights-adjacent institution: the International Criminal Court. Their research focuses on its effects on the behavior of state actors and rebels, despite its obvious weaknesses: Can an institution without coercive capabilities deter atrocities against civilians? Their findings are cautiously positive: yes, to some extent and under some circumstances–when the ICC opens investigations, when they issue arrest warrants, and when the target of arrest is not aided and abetted by the international community. To many, this will seem like a lot of hedging, but it is reflective of the careful nature of the claims Simmons has advanced over the years. According to Jo, Simmons’ “signature intrepid attitude” in taking on hard, policy-relevant questions typically produces careful results that are subtle but important.
The work may not have convinced some hardline realists, but what sets it apart from much of the status quo is its realism. Both public and academic discourse tends to the extremes in this issue area: either international human rights principles are the lodestars by which we find the better angels of our nature, or they are farcical, face-saving scraps of paper, incapable of bringing about real-world change.
Simmons encourages us to fall into neither of these traps. Her account is neither simplistic nor overly sanguine. International human rights law and institutions can effect change if the right conditions are met. They have the capacity to stimulate organization, participation, and mobilization, but only when people live in conditions where they believe that securing such rights will improve their well-being, and only when they believe mobilization has some chance to succeed.
This message of calibrated optimism is prescient for a moment when skepticism is running high among both advocates and opponents of the international legal regime. Change is possible, but only when the right conditions are met. The conditions are not fixed, however. They are malleable, and Simmons’ research helps guide advocates of human rights programs, both inside and outside the academy.
BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS
My path first crossed with Beth’s shortly after she arrived at the University of Pennsylvania, taking a position as the Andrea Mitchell University Professor in Law, Political Science, and Business Ethics. I arrived for an inaugural event for an academic center, complete with hors d’oeuvres, a live jazz band, and a man milling about the gallery with what I would later identify as some sort of camera stabilizer. After a lifetime of public-school education, I was feeling more than a little out of place taking a seat along the far corner of a table. “They’re trying very hard, aren’t they?” a voice said, and before I realized Beth was seated next to me. I was put at ease.
I was hired by Beth as a postdoctoral research fellow to work together on her growing research program on borders and boundaries in international politics. The two of us had mutual interests, both in territorial politics –remember, she was almost a geographer before electing to study Government at Harvard– and the question of how to adequately measure latent theoretical constructs. What materialized was an effort to understand the sudden and rampant hardening of international borders over the past several years. Theories of territorial politics typically emphasized military conflict and cross-border trade, but recent events seemed to point in other directions. Contemporary border hardening wasn’t, it seemed, a simple reaction to military threats or illicit movement—it also captured theatrical and performative elements seeking to reassure a public wary of the consequences of globalization.
We developed the concept of “border orientation” to help make sense of these patterns. We argued that border orientation describes states’ commitments to project control over the territory along its borders and that it does so, at least in part, to signal its authority to audiences both foreign and domestic. Together with a broad research team, we collected data on various forms of border controls to measure border orientation, and we show that it is linked strongly with diffuse cultural, economic, and security anxieties, as well as the global rise in populism.
The concept of border orientation is hardly Simmons’ first or only foray into the study of territory. Years earlier she had introduced an institutionalist framework for studying border disputes which challenged simpler approaches which treated borders as material facts rather than the complex political constructs they are. Kenneth Schultz recognized her contribution in his review article on territorial disputes, which further developed the approach to a broader “borders as institutions” research program, now widely applied.
And more recently, she argues with Hein Goemans that the world is grappling with countervailing trends between the “sovereign territorial order” which privileges territorial authority and ethno-national identification, and the “liberal international order” which prioritizes principles of universality and global exchange. With Robert Shaffer she tracks the rise of border anxiety in the rhetoric expressed at the United Nations General Assembly, and with Rachel Hulvey she extends border orientation into cyberspace. With Gino Pauselli, she circles back to her deep commitment to human rights research by demonstrating a link between border wall construction and allegations of abuse by border and immigration officials.
The strategies that states are using to manage their borders are still evolving toward unknown ends, and the political science community still lacks the theory and resources to provide a full account of the causes and consequences of these movements. But, as was the case in the human rights literature, Simmons has established a progressive research program which will over the course of the next several years be built around, challenged, and extended.
VALUE IN POLITICAL SCIENCE EDUCATION
In her statement of views for the APSA presidency, Simmons communicated the importance of strengthening values in political science education, stating: “The public needs to know what the value added is of teaching political science at the college level. We need to clearly articulate the wide range of values that motivate our teaching and the wide range of skills available for understanding the political world.”
Simmons is well-equipped to help guide the discipline toward these goals. That she has already communicated the importance of her own research to a wide audience is by now self-evident. What readers of her work may not know, however, is that she also speaks with authority when it comes to the educational process. She is a model teacher, mentor, and colleague.
She argues that we, as a field, do not need to arrive at a single set of educational values, but many of her own are apparent from the experiences of her students. One value is being attentive to students’ individual needs, and generous with your time. Gino Pauselli, as a former doctoral advisee, again captures things well:
The assumption about Beth Simmons, I would think, is that her stature and productivity keep her at a certain remove. That assumption is wrong. She is very generous with her knowledge and experience. She prepares students for every stage of the job market with the same rigor she brings to her scholarship. I remember her getting briefly emotional at my dissertation defense: not when the committee delivered its verdict, but when I turned to hug my mother. It was a small moment, and it said everything about what she understands the work of advising to actually be.
She also values intellectual flexibility in the education process: allowing oneself to be tested and proven wrong, to adapt to new research programs, to read widely and to appreciate work on its own terms. What this often means is that good political science educators push others to rigorously advance work toward their own ends. Kathryn Sikkink, a former colleague at Harvard, captures this when discussing the way she provides feedback:
Any time you are fortunate enough to have Beth comment on your work, you see her razor-sharp mind focus on how you could make it better by thinking of better ways to test your hypothesis, better kinds of data you should gather, or how to more clearly state your arguments. And note, she is not trying to make you do what she would do, she is trying to help you do a better job doing the work you want to do.
Her coauthors echo this commitment to clear communication. Hein Goemans, who coauthored an influential article with Beth on the tensions of territoriality in the liberal international order reportedly ”Remember[s], fondly! An interaction we had about a couple of paragraphs. I had written one version, Beth had written another. I was convinced of the merit of my version and gave both of them to a brilliant friend of mine, outside of political science. His verdict was unambiguous: Beth’s version was much better. I think that her ability to communicate, not just in writing, but also on a human level is one of her very greatest strengths."
And speaking from my own experience, like any good educator, the commentary she provides has a habit of getting stuck in your head, especially at the times you need it the most. Some of these lessons will prove helpful as we move forward as a discipline. Ours is one which rightly values technical expertise, but we could do much better to convey these messages more plainly (“People do not think in deciles, Mike”). We also value the pursuit of objectivity, but objectivity does not free us from the responsibility to have a clear voice, inside or outside the pages of a journal (“What is it you’d really like to say here?”).
“What is it you’d really like to say here?” is a question I repeat to myself as often as any in the research process. If we, as a discipline, are to arrive at a common narrative about the value of a political science education, then we need to have a clear, direct, and above all compelling answer to that question. Luckily, APSA has elected a president who is good at getting to the bottom of such things.
