Graham Allison

Graham Allison
Graham Tillett Allison Jr. (born March 23, 1940) is an American political scientist and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is known for his contributions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. His book Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection, co-written with Peter Szanton, was published in 1976 and influenced the foreign policy of the Carter administration. Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy, with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism.
Biography
Allison is from Charlotte, North Carolina and graduated from Myers Park High School in 1958. He attended Davidson College for two years, then graduated from Harvard University in 1962 with an B.A. degree. Allison then completed B.A. and M.A. in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar in 1964 and returned to Harvard to earn a Ph.D. in political science in 1968, where Henry Kissinger was one of his professors.
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 book Essence 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 understanding foreign policy decision-making using a rational actor model. Essence of Decision revolutionized the study of decision-making in political science and beyond.
Allison became dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1977. He left that position in 1989. Over the course of his tenure as dean the School increased in size by 400% and its endowment increased by 700%.
He was associated with the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans from 1993 to 1994, where he coordinated strategy and policy towards the states of the former Soviet Union. President Bill Clinton awarded Allison the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal".
Allison directed the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs from 1995 until 2017, when he was succeeded by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.
In the 2017 book Destined for War, Allison coined the phrase Thucydides Trap, which, according to him, refers to the theory that "when one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result". Allison's term follows the ancient text History of the Peloponnesian War, in which Thucydides wrote, "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." The term appeared in a paid opinion advertisement in The New York Times on April 6, 2017, on the occasion of U.S. President Donald Trump's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, which stated, "Both major players in the region share a moral obligation to steer away from Thucydides's Trap." Allison asserts that circumstances at the start of World War I (involving British fears about Germany), the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Thirty Years' War (involving French insecurity about the Habsburg empires of Spain and Austria) exhibit the trap. Both Allison's conception of the Thucydides Trap and its applicability to U.S.-Chinese relations have encountered heavy scholarly criticism. In March 2019, the Journal of Chinese Political Science dedicated a special issue to the topic, suggesting power transition narratives do appear to matter with regard to domestic perception.
Allison remains Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard.
Allison has also been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies (1973–74); member of the visiting committee on foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution (1972–77); and a member of the Trilateral Commission (1974–84 and 2018). He was among those mentioned to succeed David Rockefeller as President of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1979 Allison received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden.
In 2009 he was awarded the NAS Award for Behavior Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War from the National Academy of Sciences.
Allison has also been a member of the Board of Trustees for the lobbying group USACC (United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce).
Allison is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Defence analyst work
Allison has been heavily involved in U.S. defense policy since working as an advisor and consultant to the Pentagon in the 1960s, and has been consultant for the RAND Corporation. He has been a member of the Secretary of Defense's Defense Policy Board from 1985. He was a special advisor to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger for three years in the second term of office of Ronald Reagan.
Publications
Books
Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2017). .
Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Little, Brown (1971). .
2nd ed., with Philip Zelikow. Longman (1999). .
Articles
The Path to AI Arms Control, Foreign Affairs, October 13, 2023 (co-authored with Henry Kissinger)
Wikipedia paid editing scandal
From 2012 to 2013, the Belfer Center (through the Wikimedia Foundation) paid an editor to cite Allison's scholarly writings in various articles. Funding for the position came from the Stanton 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.
See also
Global policeman
List of books about nuclear issues
On Nuclear Terrorism
The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism
The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger
References
Bibliography
Allison, Graham (2015-09-24). "The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?", The Atlantic.
Welch, David (1993). "Graham Allison". In American Political Scientists: A Dictionary, eds G. Utter and C. Lockhart. Greenwood Press.
Works
1969: "Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis". American Political Science Review. 63(3): 689–718.
1971: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Little, Brown.
1972: "Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications." World Politics. 24:40–79 (with Morton H. Halperin).
1976: Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection. Basic Books (with Peter Szanton).
1983: Sharing International Responsibility Among the Trilateral Countries. Trilateral Commission (with Nobuhiko Ushiba and Thierry de Montbrial).
1985: Hawks, Doves and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War. W.W. Norton. (edited with Albert Carnesale and Joseph Nye Jr).
1989: Windows of Opportunity: From Cold War to Peaceful Competition. Ballinger (edited with William Ury).
1992: Rethinking America's Security: Beyond Cold War to New World Order. W.W. Norton (edited with Gregory Treverton).
1996: Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material. MIT Press.
2004: Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. Henry Holt.
2013: Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World. MIT Press (with Robert D. Blackwill, Ali Wyne, and a foreword by Henry A. Kissinger).
2017: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
External links
Appearances on C-SPAN
Articles by Graham Allison at HuffPost
Graham Allison's faculty page at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School
1940 births
Living people
Writers from Charlotte, North Carolina
Davidson College alumni
Harvard College alumni
Marshall Scholars
Alumni of Hertford College, Oxford
Allison, Graham T.
Nuclear terrorism
Harvard Kennedy School faculty
Clinton administration personnel
Public administration scholars
Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs