Richard Smith
Richard Smith is a postdoctoral fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. He received his Ph.D. in late-modern European history from the University of California at Berkeley, where he focused on the history of eastern Europe and that of European international relations, and his M.A. in European Studies from Columbia University. He also received awards from the Fulbright Program and the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation in support of his archival research.
His research explores how commitments among Europe’s Great Powers to an international regime, namely the Concert of Europe, helped keep three decades of unbroken peace among them during the turn of the 20th century. He argues that such commitments, especially to the Concert’s supreme guarantee of its members’ sovereignty and territorial integrity, overcame repeated challenges posed to the regime by the novel principles of national and human rights, but that Great Power competition, balance of power, and raison d’état were ultimately the instruments of the Concert’s destruction.