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.[1] 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 L. 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.[2]
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.[5]
From 1977 to 1989, Allison was dean of the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. Over the course of his tenure as dean, Harvard Kennedy School increased in size by 400% and its endowment by 700%.
In a 2012 Financial Times article titled "Thucydides’s trap has been sprung in the Pacific", Allison coined the term the Thucydides 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 the 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."[9] 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.[10] 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."[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, the Journal of Chinese Political Science dedicated a special issue to the topic,[15] suggesting power transition narratives do appear to matter with regard to domestic perception.[16]
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.[25]
^"Nominations Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, First Session, 103d Congress: Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate". Vol. 103, no. 414. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1994. pp. 1106–1108. ISBN978-0-16-043611-6.
^"Graham Allison". Archived from the original on 11 November 2014. Retrieved 5 March 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link).
