Prof. Dr. Anthony Teitler
Professor of International Relations
Anthony works on a question states almost never ask themselves: what happens when a country is convinced it is acting for the good? His book on thirty-five years of US policy in Afghanistan takes that conviction seriously rather than dismissing it — and then traces what it actually produced. That approach runs through everything he teaches. Foreign policy is not just interests and capabilities. It is a story a state tells about itself, and stories have consequences.
Ideas are not decoration
Anthony teaches International Relations from a constructivist perspective, which in practice means refusing the shortcut that treats norms, rules and rituals as window dressing on top of “real” power politics. His courses on governance and structuration ask how the frameworks we act within are themselves produced by how we act — and what that means for anyone trying to change them. Students who arrive expecting a list of theories to memorise leave with something harder and more useful: a way of taking apart any policy and asking what it assumes about the world.
Research that left the library
Before and alongside his academic career, Anthony worked as a researcher for Doctors of the World and as a research analyst and project manager at Strategic Communication Laboratories. He continues to work as a foreign policy analyst and consultant. The humanitarian side and the strategic-communication side of that CV pull in genuinely different directions, and that tension is exactly what he brings into seminars on business ethics and corporate social responsibility — where good intentions, institutional pressure and actual outcomes rarely line up as neatly as a mission statement suggests.
Fifteen years at Karls
Anthony has taught at Karlshochschule since October 2011, across International Relations, Politics and PPE. His teaching spans foreign policy analysis, IR theory and political philosophy, and he supervises theses in all three. If you want international politics presented as a settled set of answers, this is the wrong seminar room. If you want to learn to argue about it properly, it is the right one.
Every foreign policy tells a story about itself. Learning to read that story is the work.
Facts, figures and the full CV
Teaching areas
- Foreign Policy Analysis
- International Relations Theory
- Political Philosophy
- Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics
- Governance: Norms, Rules and Rituals
- Structuration
Role: Teaching at Karlshochschule since October 2011
Academic background
- PhD in International Relations, Institute of the Americas, University College London (UCL)
- MSc Global Governance and Ethics, University College London (UCL)
Professional experience
- Foreign policy analyst and consultant
- Research analyst and project manager, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL)
- Researcher, Doctors of the World
Publications
Monograph
- Teitler, A. (2020). US Policy Towards Afghanistan, 1979–2014: ‘A Force for Good’. Routledge Studies in US Foreign Policy. London: Routledge. [link to Routledge page]
Peer-reviewed article
- Teitler, A. (2018). Obama and Afghanistan: A constructivist approach to shifting policy narrative and practices. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 31(2), 203–222. DOI: 10.1080/09557571.2018.1497009 [link to Taylor & Francis page]
Want to study with Anthony?
His courses run in the International Relations, Politics and PPE programmes. Come to an info day, sit in on a session, or write to him directly.