The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe at 50

This book traces the development of the OSCE from the opening of negotiations in 1973 of the Helsinki Final Act up to its 50th anniversary in 2025, focusing on the transition from a bridge between Eastern and Western Europe (and the US and Canada) during the final 15 years of the Cold War to its post-Cold war focus on managing conflicts in the post-communist regions of Europe after the Cold War. It analyzes developments in this region as a competition between realist and liberal/institutionalist ideas, arguing that the OSCE was constructed by its participating states as a liberal international institution that has succumbed to a renewal of "realist" ideas and actions that have reappeared in the first 25 years of the 21st century and have thereby threatened its effectiveness in enhancing security, cooperation and peace in Europe, culminating with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. P. Terrence Hopmann is currently a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Institute and previously directed the Conflict Management Program at Johns Hopkins SAIS from 2008-15. He is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Political Science Department at Brown University, where he was director of the Global Security Program of the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute of International Studies, the Center for Foreign Policy Development and the International Relations Program; was professor of political science at the University of Minnesota and director of its Center for International Studies; served as vice president of the International Studies Association and program chair of three ISA international meetings; was editor of the International Studies Quarterly; was a Fulbright Fellow in Belgium and Austria, and a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.