Stuart A. Bremer

Stuart A. Bremer, professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University, died on October 15, 2002 at the age of 58. He is survived by his wife, Kristin Broderick Bremer, a professor in political science at Kutztown State University. He is also survived by his mother Marie and his brother Richard.

Stuart's professional life was highly successful. At the core of that life were first, an abiding interest in understanding and therefore some way limiting conflict and war; second, a commitment to empirical methodologies, especially simulation and data-based research; and third, a commitment of service to students and the profession. Stuart received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Michigan State, though he did much of the work for his dissertation with Harold Guetzkow at Northwestern University. His doctoral thesis, later published as Simulated Worlds, won APSA's 1971–72 Helen Dwight Reid Award for the best dissertation in international relations.

Much of his subsequent simulationbased research was done while Stuart directed the GLOBUS project at the Wissenschaftszentrun Berlin from 1976–88. The GLOBUS model was the first global computer simulation to emphasize political-economic concerns, including again conflict, both within and between states. The model and implications developed by the GLOBUS team under Stuart's leadership were disseminated in a variety of publications, most centrally in the book, The GLOBUS Model: A Computer Model of Long-Term Global and Economic Processes. The model has found its way into both scholarly and policy domains and remains a highly influential body of work.

Upon returning to the United States, Stuart taught at Binghamton University (SUNY) for eight years and then at Penn State until his death. From those years, Stuart will be remembered for his research on international conflict and for his contributions to the academic community. He served as the Executive Director of the Peace Science Society (International) from 1989 and as editor of Conflict Management and Peace Science from 1990 until shortly before his death. In those capacities, he was largely responsible for the reemergence of the Society as a central focus for the work on issues of war and peace.

More recently, Stuart was the director of the Correlates of War 2 Project and was active in updating, regularizing, and making available a number of its data sets. He also was the coordinator of a large project funded by the National Science Foundation to update the data on Militarized Interstate Disputes through 2001. That project was uniquely designed and executed, bringing together researchers from 10 universities.

Stuart's students, friends, and colleagues will also understand his personal legacy. Stuart was particularly notable for his work with graduate students. He chaired a large number of dissertation committees and his students now occupy positions at colleges and universities worldwide. His reading and thinking ranged widely, and a friend having a meal with him could expect to become engrossed in a discussion of the most recent book on his nightstand. He also enjoyed camping and cooking, among many other activities. Still, he had a private side, and even few among even his closest friends knew about his long-time contribution of a day a week to Habitat for Humanity.

His death was too early, and we will miss him.

Barry Hughes University of Denver and Glenn Palmer Penn State University

John Aubrey Davis, Sr.

John Aubrey Davis, Sr., 90, a scholar and civil rights activist who in the 1930s organized one fo the earliest civil rights protests in Washington and helped establish the legality of economic boycotts to fight employment discrimination, died of pneumonia December 16 at an assisted living facility in Scottsdale, AZ.

Dr. Davis was a former chairman of the political science department at the City College of New York. From 1943 to 1946, he was one of four directors of the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practices.

As a scholar, he directed the nonlegal research for the NAACP brief in the Brown v. Board of Education case that led to a 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring racial segregation in the public schools to be unconstitutional.

Dr. Davis was born in Washington and graduated from Dunbar High School. He was Phi Beta Kappa and a summa cum laude graduate of Williams College and a former trustee of Williams. He received a master's degree in political science at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in political science at Columbia University.

Returning to Washington after his graduation from Williams, he discovered that the white owners of the Hamburger Grill in a black neighborhood at 12 and U streets NW had fired three black employees to give jobs to three white men. This was the summer of 1933, the peak of the Great Depression, when jobs for blacks and whites were hard to find.

Dr. Davis was a key organizer and leader of a new association called the New Negro Alliance, under whose banner he directed a “buy where you can work” boycott and a picketing protest of the Hamburger Grill, which ultimately caused the grill to shut down.

In subsequent years, the New Negro Alliance organized pickets and boycotts to protest employment practices at dozens of other Washington business establishments, including High'S Dairy Stores, Kaufman's Department Stores, Peoples Drug Stores, and Safeway, which was then known as Sanitary Grocery Company, Inc. Many of these protests were halted by court order. But a 1938 case involving Safeway reached the Supreme Court, which upheld the right of protesters to “peacefully persuade others” to act against racial discrimination in employment.

In the summer and fall of 1953, Dr. Davis directed research for the NAACP brief dealing with questions from the court about the intent with regard to segregation in education of the framers of the 14th Amendment, which deals with equal protection and due process. This included such questions as the legal history and sociology related to the amendment.

As an academician, Dr. Davis was on the faculty of Lincoln University from 1936 to 1953, then joined the faculty fo the City College of New York. He became chairman of the political science department in 1962.

He was a former vice president of the American Political Science Association, a member or the Council on Foreign Relations and a founder, executive director, and president of the American Society of African Culture. He was co-editor of Southern Africa In Transition and had written articles such as “The Influence of Africans on American Culture” in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.

In New York, he was state commissioner against discrimination from 1957 to 1961 and in 1942 was assistant director of New York State's Committee Against Discrimination in Employment. He retired from the City College of New York faculty in the 1970s.

His wife, Mavis Wormley Davis, died in 1993.

Survivors include two sons, Dr. John A. Davis, Jr., or Scottsdale, AZ, and Smith Wormley Davis of Alexandria, VA; a sister, Dorothy Davis Lucas of Silver Spring, MD; and six grandchildren.

Bart Barnes Washington Post Staff Writer © 2002, The Washington Post. Reprinted with Permission.

Robert Carver North

Robert Carver North, professor emeritus of political science at Stanford University, died of a stroke in Menlo Park, California on July 15, 2002. His death ended a 56-year association with Stanford that began when he enrolled as a graduate student of international relations in June 1946. He received his M.A. degree in 1948 and served as a research assistant [1948–52] and research associate [1952–57] at Stanford's Hoover Institution. During his stint at Hoover he worked in the “Revolution and the Development of International Relations” project directed by three of America's most distinguished social scientists: Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Ithiel de Sola Pool. Although his father had been a friend of Herbert Hoover's since college, in 1957 the former president referred to Bob as “a constant splinter in my mind.” The reason for Hoover's displeasure was Bob's challenge of the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He had written, “[T]he moment has come for us all to reread the Declaration of Independence, nail the Bill of Rights over our doors, and demonstrate to the world that we are a bold, imaginative, and constructively revolutionary people.” Bob received his Ph.D. in political science in 1957, joined the faculty as an associate professor in the Political Science Department, and was promoted to professor in 1962. Although he formally retired in 1984, he maintained a full schedule of writing and research until his death.

Bob North was born in Walton, NY, on November 17, 1914. He graduated from Union College in 1936 as a language and literature major. His first occupation was as a travel lecturer and film producer. Despite his youth, Bob came to that position with an impressive background. The Library of Congress includes three travel books that he wrote as a teenager: Bob North Starts Exploring (1927), Bob North by Canoe and Portage (1928), and Bob North with Dog Team and Indians (1929). These books were based on travels with his father in northern Canada. In the mid-1970s, Bob was contacted by a team of anthropologists from Toronto who wanted to interview him about these youthful adventure books. It turned out that absolutely nothing had been written about the Ojibway Indians of the area they were studying, though a historical memory existed of a white man and his son appearing in the dead of winter by dog sled. This was, of course, Bob and his father. Bob joined the faculty of the Milford School in Milford, CT, as an English and Social Studies teacher in 1939. World War II ended that phase of his career.

Although initially told that hypertension and a silver plate in his right femur would disqualify him from frontline combat service, Bob was sent to Officer's Candidate and several other service schools. He served as an airground liaison officer in some of the most brutal combat in the Pacific theater, including Saipan, the Northern Solomons, Bismarck Archipelago, Lingayan Gulf, and Mindanao. He received five battle stars and declined a Purple Heart because he felt that his injuries were not sufficiently serious. His return to the United States was delayed until December 1945 because he refused to leave without taking his enlisted men with him. Bob was discharged as a Captain in 1946. As a result of his wartime experiences, he resolved to focus his graduate studies on international relations with the goal of better understanding and learning to ameliorate the violence he had witnessed firsthand.

The term “Renaissance man” should be used sparingly, but it is a very appropriate description of Bob North. While in graduate school he wrote a novel, Revolt in San Marcos (1949) that was awarded the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal for fiction. His earliest scholarly publications focused on Chinese politics, including Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Elites, with Ithiel de Sola Pool (1952), Moscow and Chinese Communists (1953, 1963), and Soviet Russia and the East, (1957, 1967) and M. N. Roy's Mission to China (1963), both with Xenia Eudin.

In 1960, Bob received a major grant from the Ford Foundation for the study of international conflict and cooperation. The project, which included a number of graduate students at Stanford and Northwestern universities, focused a good deal of attention on the crisis leading up to World War I. During the course of that project, the October 1962 crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba brought the United States and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war, providing another case for the North research group. Bob's vision was never circumscribed by disciplinary boundaries. The work on the Ford project drew not only on political science and history, but also on psychology, economics, sociology, and organization theory. It also drew upon and further developed a number of methodologies, including an early application of computer content analysis for exploring systematically the rich documentary archives of the major powers in the 1914 crisis. Bob and three of his students published Content Analysis: A Handbook with Applications for the Study of International Crisis (1963). The 1914 project led to a number of dissertations, including one by Charles and Margaret Hermann at Northwestern University. Several books also emerged from the project, including International Crisis: The Outbreak of World War I (1976) coauthored by Bob and diplomatic historian Eugenia Nomikos.

Never one to rest on his laurels or to plough over familiar terrain, Bob's later work, much of it with the collaboration of Nazli Choucri, developed the theory of “lateral pressure” as a way of explaining international conflict. Whereas the 1914 project had focused on the key decision-makers and their perceptions on a day-to-day—or hour-by-hour—basis, lateral pressure theory incorporated such sociological and economic variables as population dynamics and resources. Nations in Conflict: National Growth and International Violence (1975) and The Challenge of Japan Before World War II and After (1993), both with Nazli Choucri, developed lateral growth theory. At his death, Bob and Nazli were working on another, as yet untitled, manuscript on advanced lateral growth theory.

Bob's other major works include The Foreign Relations of China (1969), The World That Could Be (1976), and War, Peace, Survival: Global Politics and Conceptual Synthesis (1990). The World That Could Be examines the interaction between development and growth phenomena on the one hand, and political ideas on the other. Describing the state's propensity for violence as a stage of social organization, Bob concluded that it is possible to produce a future with other alternatives. The last two books are especially important reminders that, although Bob lived through the bloodiest conflict in history and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, he never lost his faith in the ability of social scientific inquiry to contribute to mankind's ability to cope better with its most pressing problems.

Bob North was the recipient of many honors, including the previously mentioned Gold Medal for his novel. He was elected President of the International Studies Association, received a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Conflict Process Section of the American Political Science Association, and the 1998 Nessim Habif World Prize from the University Institute of Advanced Studies of International Relations in Geneva, Switzerland. The citation for that prize concluded: “His contribution to the study of international relations is prominent in all respects. It is the reflection of an open and genuine mind which has inspired a whole generation of researchers and students.”

Any description of Bob North and his long and productive career must touch upon his human qualities. He was soft-spoken and very slow to anger. There was always a twinkle in his eye, especially when he encountered new ideas, and he had a wonderful sense of humor. Bob encouraged students and colleagues to pursue their ideas and interests rather than trying to fit them into any pattern or paradigm imposed by him. He sought neither clones nor disciples. Three of his graduate students went on to serve as presidents of the International Studies Association, and two from another university with whom he shared data and insights from the 1914 crisis research were also elected presidents of ISA. Despite their shared interest in international relations and their immense intellectual debts to Bob, each went on to develop his or her own perspectives and research agendas. Bob was, in short, a gentle and generous giant who touched a great many lives, and he will be greatly missed by all who were fortunate enough to know him. Several decades ago I wrote, “This book is gratefully dedicated to Robert North, for whom the phrase ‘scholar and gentleman’ might have been invented.” The years since have only deepened my appreciation for him as a brilliant scholar and as a warm, wonderful human being. All who knew him would agree.

Bob is survived by his devoted wife, Dorothy, three daughters, one son, eleven grandchildren, and six great grandchildren. A daughter and his first wife predeceased him.

Ole R. Holsti Duke University

David Resnick

David Resnick died suddenly of a heart attack at his home on Saturday, August 31, 2002. A scholar of international repute, he had recently returned from Aberystwyth, Wales, where he had delivered a paper that examined the impact of the Internet on tolerance at the Eighth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas. That a classical political theorist (A.B. Columbia University 1964, Magna Cum Laude; Ph.D. Harvard 1972), an authority on the political theories of John Locke, had also become a leading expert on the political implications of the Internet, simply illustrated the astonishing breadth of his intellect.

A political theorist in the fullest sense, David had a remarkable ability to relate his insights across many fields in political science. His solely authored articles and chapters included not only essays on the political ideas of Locke, Hume, Marx, and Aristotle but also essays on citizenship, justice, the normalization of cyberspace, the impact of the Internet on college life, and universal Internet access as a moral problem. These appeared in journals as diverse as the American Political Science Review, The Review of Politics, Political Theory, The European Legacy, History of European Ideas, First Monday and New Political Science, as well as in New York University Press's Nomos series and in edited volumes published by other university presses or scholarly institutes.

He co-authored articles and chapters with Stephen Bennett, George Bishop, Bonnie Fisher, Rachel Gibson, Michael Margolis, Norman Thomas, and Joel Wolfe that covered political parties, political communication, cycles in political history, and survey research via the Internet. These appeared in The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Polity, The American Sociologist, Southeastern Political Review, Party Politics, The Journal of Policy History, and in numerous conference proceedings and edited volumes. He also co-authored Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace “Revolution” (Sage, 2000) with Michael Margolis. At the time of his death, he and Margolis were working on a second book, tentatively titled The Promise of Internet Democracy: Political Ideals and Political Reality, under contract with Peter Lang Publishers. The book will be completed and published posthumously.

David was both an outstanding teacher and a dutiful colleague. His teaching repertoire included undergraduate courses in ancient, medieval, and modern political theory, honors courses on utopian political thought and on American Constitutional liberty, and graduate courses and seminars on 19th and 20th century political theory and on scope and methods in political science. He headed the Department's Political Theory Field Committee and directed its Center for the Study of Democratic Citizenship. He previously served as Director of Undergraduate and of Graduate Studies. In the former capacity he played a central role in planning and developing an inter-disciplinary major in International Affairs which regularly enrolls about 80 majors. In the latter capacity, he revamped both the substance and the organization of the current graduate and undergraduate curricula.

He also served on numerous college and university committees and councils where he championed maintaining faculty governance in the modern entrepreneurial research institution. A defender of academic values, he produced an eloquent critique of the priorities of the University's administration, which the local AAUP chapter distributed as a special newsletter during the last round of collective bargaining.

David joined the University of Cincinnati's department of political science as an assistant professor in 1978, rose to associate professor in 1985, and became professor of political science in 2000. He was assistant professor of government at Cornell University before moving to UC. Throughout his career, he displayed a keen sense of humor and a strong commitment to the ideals of higher education. He was a citizen, husband, father, raconteur, and friend whom we dearly miss.

Michael Margolis, George Bishop and Thomas G. Moore University of Cincinnati