Professor Emeritus of Political Science Bruce Russett has passed away.
Bruce Russett, Ph.D. Yale University, 1961, was Dean Acheson Research Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Yale. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has honorary doctorates from Uppsala University (2002) and Williams College (2011). He held visiting appointments at Columbia, Michigan, North Carolina, Harvard, the Free University of Brussels, the Richardson Institute in London, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Tel Aviv, and Tokyo University Law School.
He edited the Journal of Conflict Resolution from 1973 to 2009, and with Paul Kennedy staffed the Ford Foundation 1995 report, The United Nations in Its Second Half-Century.
He was past president of the International Studies Association, and with John Oneal, their book, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations received its Best Book of the Decade 2000-2009). Also past president of the Peace Science Society, in 2009 received its quadrennial Founder’s Medal for “significant and distinguished life-long scientific contributions to peace science.”
Of his 27 books, others include Grasping the Democratic Peace (1993); The Once and Future Security Council (1997); (2001) and Hegemony and Democracy (2011). Harvey Starr, ed., Bruce M. Russett: Pioneer in the Scientific and Normative Study of War, Peace, and Policy (2015) gives a much longer biography.
Russett received his B.A. in Political Economy from Williams College in 1956, a Diploma in Economics from King’s College, Cambridge in 1957, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale in 1961. His first academic appointment was at MIT in 1961. He has taught at Yale since 1962 and has been Dean Acheson Professor since 1985. He has held visiting appointments at Columbia University (1965), Mental Health Research Institute, University of Michigan (1965–66), Institut d’Etudes Europeennes, Université Libre de Bruxelles (1969–70), Richardson Institute for Peace & Conflict Research, London (1973–74), Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina (1979–80), Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (1974), University of Tel Aviv (1989), Professor of International Capital Markets Law, Tokyo University Law School (1996), and Harvard University (2001).
You can read more on his personal website. Other remembrances may be found on the International Studies Association website (here) and the blog Good Authority (here).
A public memorial service will be held Saturday, October 7, at 2pm at St. Thomas More (https://stm.yale.edu/).