Joseph MacKay is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations. He works on the history of international theory and the history of international ordering. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.

His research has appeared in the Review of International Studies, International Studies Quarterly, International Theory, the Journal of Global Security Studies, and Social Science History, and with co-authors in the Journal of Peace Research, the European Journal of International Security, and International Peacekeeping, among other venues. His 2023 book, The Counterinsurgent Imagination: A New Intellectual History, is published with Cambridge University Press.

 Counterinsurgency, empire, piracy, IR theory, qualitative methods, Central and East Asia