Graham Allison | |
|---|---|
 Allison in 2017 | |
| Director of theBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs | |
| In office June 1, 1995 – July 1, 2017 | |
| Succeeded by | Ash Carter |
| Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans | |
| In office August 6, 1993 – March 15, 1994 | |
| President | Bill Clinton |
| Dean of theJohn F. Kennedy School of Government | |
| In office June 1, 1977 – May 30, 1989 | |
| Preceded by | Don K. Price |
| Succeeded by | Robert D. Putnam |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Graham Tillett Allison Jr. (1940-03-23)March 23, 1940 (age 85) |
| Education | Harvard University (BA,PhD) Hertford College, Oxford (BA,MA) |
Graham Tillett Allison Jr. (born March 23, 1940) is an Americanpolitical scientist and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at theJohn F. Kennedy School of Government atHarvard University.[1]
He is known for his contributions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis ofdecision making, especially during times of crisis. His bookRemaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection, co-written with Peter L. Szanton, was published in 1976 and influenced the foreign policy of theCarter administration.
Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S.national security and defense policy, with a special interest innuclear weapons andterrorism.[2]
Allison is fromCharlotte, North Carolina, and graduated fromMyers Park High School in 1958.[3] He attendedDavidson College for two years, then transferred toHarvard University from which he graduated in 1962 with aB.A. degree. Allison then completed B.A. andM.A. inphilosophy, politics and economics atOxford University as aMarshall Scholar in 1964 and returned to Harvard to earn aPh.D. in political science in 1968, whereHenry Kissinger was one of his professors.[4]
Allison has spent his entire academic career at Harvard, as an assistant professor (1968), associate professor (1970), then full professor (1972) in the department of government on the strength of his bookEssence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971), in which he developed two new theoretical paradigms – an organizational process model and a bureaucratic politics model – to compete with the then-prevalent approach of understandingforeign policy decision-making using arational actor model.Essence of Decision revolutionized the study of decision-making in political science and beyond.[5]
From 1977 to 1989, Allison wasdean of theHarvard Kennedy School atHarvard University. Over the course of his tenure as dean, Harvard Kennedy School increased in size by 400% and its endowment by 700%.
He was associated with theAssistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans from 1993 to 1994, where he coordinated strategy and policy towards the states of the formerSoviet Union. PresidentBill Clinton awarded Allison theDepartment of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations withRussia,Ukraine,Belarus, andKazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal".
Allison directed theBelfer Center for Science and International Affairs from 1995 until 2017, when he was succeeded by former U.S. Secretary of DefenseAsh Carter.[6]
In a 2012Financial Times article titled "Thucydides’s trap has been sprung in the Pacific", Allison coined the term theThucydides Trap to argue for the possibility of a war between the United States and China.[7] Allison later defined as the Trap as a historical pattern where "when one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result,"[8] and in 2017 expanded his argument about a future conflict into a full-length book,Destined for War. The theory is based on theHistory of the Peloponnesian War, in whichThucydides wrote, "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta."[9] Allison asserts that circumstances at the start ofWorld War I (involving British fears about Germany), theWar of the Spanish Succession, and theThirty Years' War (involving French insecurity about the Habsburg empires of Spain and Austria) exhibit the trap.[10] The term appeared in a paid opinion advertisement inThe New York Times on April 6, 2017, on the occasion of U.S. PresidentDonald Trump's meeting with Chinese PresidentXi Jinping, which stated, "Both major players in the region share a moral obligation to steer away from Thucydides's Trap."[11] Both Allison's conception of the Thucydides Trap and its applicability to U.S.-Chinese relations have encountered heavy scholarly criticism.[12][13][14] In March 2019, theJournal of Chinese Political Science dedicated a special issue to the topic,[15] suggestingpower transition narratives do appear to matter with regard to domestic perception.[16]
Allison remainsDouglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard.[17]
Allison has also been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies (1973–74); member of the visiting committee on foreign policy studies at theBrookings Institution (1972–77); and a member of theTrilateral Commission (1974–84 and 2018).[18] He was among those mentioned to succeedDavid Rockefeller as President of theCouncil on Foreign Relations. In 1979 Allison received anhonorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences atUppsala University,Sweden.[19]
In 2009 he was awarded theNAS Award for Behavior Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War from theNational Academy of Sciences.[20]
Allison has also been a member of the Board of Trustees for the lobbying group USACC (United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce).[21]
Allison is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of theCouncil on Foreign Relations.
Allison has been heavily involved inU.S. defense policy since working as an advisor and consultant tothe Pentagon in the 1960s, and has been consultant for theRAND Corporation. He has been a member of theSecretary of Defense'sDefense Policy Board from 1985. He was a special advisor toSecretary of DefenseCaspar Weinberger for three years in the second term of office ofRonald Reagan.[22]
From 2012 to 2013, the Belfer Center (through theWikimedia Foundation) paid an editor to cite Allison's scholarly writings in various articles. Funding for the position came from theStanton Foundation, for which Graham Allison's wife, Liz Allison, was one of two trustees. The editor also made "supposedly problematic edits" based heavily on work of other scholars affiliated with the Belfer Center.[25]
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