William Bain

William Bain holds a joint appointment at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of Political Science and as Head of Studies for Global Affairs at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on international relations, the history of ideas, and how religion affects the theory and practice of international relations. He takes an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses political theory, history, and theology in examining the role of religion and faith in historical and contemporary international affairs.

His forthcoming book Political Theology of International Order explores how Christian theology, and particularly medieval debates about the nature of God, shape international relations and ideas such as anarchy, balance of power, and global constitutionalism. He has written extensively on international relations theory, as well as on security and intellectual history. Among his recent publications is Medieval Foundations of International Relations (Routledge, 2017).

He is co-editor of International Relations and an advisory board member of Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics. He is a research associate at the NUS Centre for Legal Theory and the Centre of Advanced International Theory at the University of Sussex.

He received a BA from the University of South Carolina, and a MA and PhD from the University of British Colombia. He previously held appointments at Aberystwyth University and the University of Glasgow, and was a Visiting Professor at Université Libre de Bruxelles.