About
Biography
Michael Fowler is Professor of Political Science at the University of Louisville. Twice a Fulbright Scholar to Japan and three times a visiting professor for Semester at Sea, Professor Fowler has published seven books as well as articles in such scholarly journals as Review of International Studies, the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, International Studies Perspectives, and the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution. Fowler has been awarded the University’s Exemplary Multicultural Teaching Award and its Distinguished International Service Award. Louisville students have nominated Professor Fowler as a Faculty Favorite on nine occasions, and Louisville athletes as a Faculty Mentor on three. His written work has been assigned in courses at various universities, including Stanford, Columbia, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. Fowler has lectured in Argentina, Australia, China, Costa Rica, Ecuador, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Panama, and Venezuela, and has worked extensively with the training wings of the ministries of foreign affairs in Laos and Vietnam. His areas of expertise include Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, Drug Trafficking, International Law and Organization, U.S. Foreign Policy, and American Law.
When not at the University, Professor Fowler can be found running his 115-acre horse farm in southern Indiana or coaching baseball, where teams he has coached have won four KCAA state championships.
Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
Michael Fowler is the author of a Carolina Academic Press textbook entitled Mastering Negotiation that explores negotiation strategies in complex disputes, while focusing especially on interest-based, or principled, negotiation.
Professor Fowler has taught negotiation to undergraduate and graduate students, law and Master’s students, and has conducted negotiation training courses, seminars, or workshops for lawyers, diplomats, professors, military officers, business executives, and human resources professionals, and other mid-career individuals. Among the groups he has worked with, teaching or facilitating negotiation, are the Guatemalan Electoral Office, the Louisville Human Relations Commission, and the National Forum for Black Public Administrators.
From 2000 to 2005 Michael Fowler served as the founding director of the University of Louisville’s Muhammad Ali Institute for Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution. Under his direction, the Ali Institute founded the North American Peace Ambassadors program, the world’s first student-exchange program in conflict resolution that included universities in Mexico, Canada, and the United States and was awarded a prestigious Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education (FIPSE) grant from the U.S. Department of Education. While he taught at the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville and directed the Ali Institute, Professor Fowler’s teams of law students won five American Bar Association Midwestern Regional Negotiation Championships from 1997 to 2003 and placed in the top ten of the up to 260 teams competing on five occasions, including third in North America in 2004.
Professor Fowler is also considered an authority on teaching negotiation effectively, having written articles for International Studies Perspectives on cross-cultural simulations and negotiation pedagogy and having led a negotiation teaching workshop for dozens of professors from universities across China at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.
Drug Trafficking
Michael Fowler has researched and written on the trafficking of different narcotics through the bridge states of Central America. Drawing on more than a decade of research in the region, he and co-author Julie Bunck published Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation: Drug Trafficking and the Law in Central America (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). An AHC television documentary on a Honduran kingpin (Manhunt: Kill or Capture: The Devil Incarnate), that aired across the United States and Canada in October 2015, drew heavily on the research in this book.
International Relations: International Law and Organization
Professor Fowler has taught international law and organization at the University of Louisville and in visiting posts at Georgetown University and George Washington University and abroad in Panama and Vietnam and for Semester at Sea. Alongside former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General Sumihiro Kuyama, he published Envisioning Reform: Enhancing UN Accountability in the 21st Century (United Nations University Press, 2009).
With co-author Julie Bunck, Michael Fowler also published Law, Power, and the Sovereign State: The Evolution and Application of the Concept of Sovereignty (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). Among his recent articles, also with Julie Bunck, is “The Kellogg-Briand Pact: A Reappraisal,” Tulane Journal of International and Comparative Law 27, 2 (Spring 2019): 229-76.
U.S. Foreign Policy
Professor Fowler has taught U.S. foreign policy at the University of Louisville, on Semester-at-Sea, at the University of Colima in Mexico, and in the American Studies Program of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. He has lectured on topics in American Foreign Policy at Bond University, Australia, and on two occasions at the military university in Ecuador. He is the author of Thinking About Human Rights: Contending Approaches to Human Rights in U.S. Foreign Policy (University Press of America, 1987).
American Law
A former practicing attorney at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo, P.C., in Boston, Michael Fowler has been admitted to the bars of Massachusetts, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. He taught law at the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville from 1996 to 2003. He is the author of With Justice For All?: The Nature of the American Legal System (Prentice Hall, 1998).
Courses
POLS 331 International Organization
POLS 332 International Law
POLS 337 Law, Diplomacy, and Power: The Foreign Relations of the United States
POLS 364 World Order
POLS 506 Coping with Conflict: The North American Experience
POLS 530 International Negotiation