Jack Levy

Focus areas: international relations, causes of war, foreign policy decision-making, political psychology

Jack S. Levy is an Adjunct Professor in Political Science for the Fall 2017 term. He is Board of Governors' Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia. He is past-president of the International Studies Association and of the Peace Science Society. Levy’s primary teaching and research interests are the causes of interstate war, foreign policy decision-making, political psychology, and qualitative methodology. His books include War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975 (1983), Explaining War and Peace: Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals (2007, co-edited with Gary Goertz), Causes of War (2010, with William R. Thompson),  The Arc of War: Origins, Escalation, and Transformation (2011, with William R. Thompson), The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology, 2nd ed. (2013, co-edited with Leonie Huddy and David O. Sears), and The Outbreak of the First World War: Structure, Politics, and Decision-Making (2014, co-edited with John A. Vasquez). Levy’s current research projects focus on balance of power theory, power transition theory, preventive war, economic interdependence and conflict, Britain’s misperception of the German threat in the 1930s, the methodology of counterfactual analysis, and several papers related to the First World War.

Education

• PhD, University of Wisconsin
• MA, University of Wisconsin
• BS, Harvey Mudd College