Harvey Starr: Pioneer in the Study of Conflict Processes and International Relations

This book sets out, through Starr’s personal story, his interest in how the ideas of “intellectual trajectories” and “political memories” could be incorporated into intellectual autobiography, thus exploring how the personal lives of individual academics intersected with their professional interests. By following the development of his approach to research, interdisciplinarity, the logic of inquiry, and the opportunity and willingness framework scholars and researchers will see how his groundbreaking research in Conflict Processes and International Relations Theory developed and were interlinked (especially diffusion, geography and spatiality; the democratic peace and integration; decision making). In addition, graduate students and junior faculty should find useful hints about how to navigate their way through the complexities of becoming both a professional and successful academic and scholar.

• This book provides the most complete treatment of the work and contributions of Harvey Starr, a former President of the International Studies Association. 

• Important for contemporary students of international relations, and their understanding of IR theory and methods.

• Demonstrates an eclectic linking of theoretical, logical, and empirical approaches to the study of IR—providing a critical logic of inquiry to do research.

• Provides insights and blueprints for how to develop interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship, highlighting geography and social-psychology.

• Affords graduate students and recent Ph.D.s  guidance in the development of research, becoming a professional, and the choices to be made in one’s academic career.

After 25 years at South Carolina and 43 years in the discipline, he retired in June 2014.  Professor Starr served as Chair of the Department at USC from 1998-2006; he previously served as Department Chair at Indiana University from 1984-1989. He has also taught at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and the Australian National University.

Professor Starr specializes in international relations theory and methods, international conflict, geopolitics and spatial analyses, foreign policy analysis, and language and politics. He is the author or co-author of 19 books and monographs and almost one hundred journal articles and book chapters. He has been awarded numerous grants, including three from the National Science Foundation.  In 1998, he was the recipient of the USC’s Russell Award for Research in Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2015 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conflict Processes Section of the American Political Science Association “in recognition of scholarly contributions that have fundamentally improved the study of conflict processes.”