8400 Baltimore Ave., Suite 250, College Park, MD 20740
On Friday September 25 at 11:00 am, Dr. Ted Gurr will give a lecture at START headquarters titled "The Future of Conflict Studies". Dr Gurr will discuss his concluding chapter for a forthcoming book, States and Peoples in Conflict: Transformations of Conflict Studies, edited by Peter Grabosky, Mark Lichbach, and Michael Stohl (Routledge, 2016).The event is free and open to the public, but RSVP's are appreciated.
Ted Robert Gurr, Ph.D. (New York University, 1965) is Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, College Park. He founded and consults on the Minorities at Risk project, which tracks the political status and activities of more than 300 communal groups world-wide. This study has provided data for his analyses of the causes and management of ethnopolitical protest and rebellion, for example in Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century (United States Institute of Peace, 2000).
In the 1960s he began the Polity study which tracks democracy and autocracy world-wide from 1800 to the present. In 1994-95 he helped establish the State Failure (now Political Instability) Task Force for the Clinton Administration and continues to serve as a senior consultant. He has written or edited more than twenty books and monographs including the award-winning Why Men Rebel (1970; 40th anniversary edition with a new introduction 2011) and Peace and Conflict 2012: A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts, Self-Determination Movements, and Democracy (Paradigm Press, co-edited with Joseph Hewitt and Jonathan Wilkenfeld). Earlier editions in this report series, which he co-founded with Monty G. Marshall in 2001, document the global decline in internal wars during the 1990s and the ascendancy of negotiated agreements for managing ethnic and other internal conflicts.
In 1993-94 Professor Gurr was president of the International Studies Association and in 1996-97 he held the Swedish government’s Olof Palme Visiting Professorship at the University of Uppsala. Since 2001 he has been a member of an informal network of scholars concerned with risks of genocide (see http://www/GPANet.org ) and participated in the 2004 Stockholm International Forum on the Prevention of Genocide. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Sofia, Bulgaria.
In March 2005 he convened a workshop on economic roots of terrorism for the Club de Madrid’s International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. From 2006 to 2012 he worked collaboratively with Prof. Lyubov Mincheva of the University of Sofia on a comparative study of “unholy alliances,” trans-border militant and criminal networks in Europe, and on policies for containing them. Their coauthored book, Crime-Terror Alliances and the State: Ethnonationalist and Islamist Challenges to Regional Security was published by Routledge in 2012.
His latest book project is an annotated collection of his essays on Political Rebellion: Causes, Outcomes, Alternatives to be published early in 2015 by Routledge.
He lives in Summerlin, Las Vegas, Nevada where he is active in Rotary International and the World Affairs Council of Las Vegas.