Paul Domenic Senese, associate professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, died on June 20, 2006, after a long and courageous battle with illness. He left this world as he had spent the last several years of his life, surrounded by his loving wife, Tracy Jarvis, his parents, his two sisters, his brother, and many other relatives. At a time when social scientists are reporting weakening bonds of friendship among Americans, Paul was clearly an outlier. St Joseph's University Church could hardly contain the large number of close friends, professional colleagues, and former students who attended his funeral mass.
Paul was born on June 2, 1967. To many that knew him, Paul appeared to spend the rest of his days “sauntering,” the only word that can be used to describe his easily imitated gait. But “sauntering” is also an apt description of Paul's persona. Paul appeared to take life as it came to him in easy stride; he was almost always positive about the past, the present, and, especially, the future. In fact, he even eagerly anticipated the operation that failed to extend his life. Paul was sometimes reminiscent of Joe DiMaggio. Paul probably would not like the comparison—because DiMaggio never played for his beloved Red Sox. But, like DiMaggio, everything seemed to come easily to Paul: friendships, scholarship, teaching, athletics, life in general. As well, Paul was graceful under pressure and always seemed to come through in the clutch.
Appearances, however, were deceiving. Despite his easy and mild manner, Paul was intense and competitive, but mostly with himself. But for his friends and colleagues in the department of political science at the University at Buffalo, Paul's inner drive only revealed itself toward the very end of his life. Even had Paul not recently confessed to some of us that he was in fact intensely driven, however, we would have known anyway. He fully and bravely confronted the disease that would eventually claim his life, never feeling sorry for himself. Rather than accept what turned out to be the inevitable, he opted to “go for it.”
Paul was born in Niagara Falls and raised in the nearby Town of Niagara. He attended Niagara University as an undergraduate where he worked closely with Meredith Reid Sarkees and Nancy McGlen. At Binghamton University, where Paul earned an M.A. in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 1995, he studied with and was influenced by Glenn Palmer and the late Stuart Bremer. His dissertation, entitled Dispute to War: Patterns and Processes in the Escalation of Interstate Conflict, clearly demonstrated a knack for cutting-edge research that would shortly catch the attention of the academic community.
In 1995, Paul began his teaching career at Vanderbilt University, where he met Tracy, and where he still has many good friends. After leaving Vanderbilt, he spent a year in nearby Memphis as an assistant professor of international relations at Rhodes College. In what seemed to be his ardent desire and his destiny, he joined the department of political science at the University at Buffalo as an assistant professor in 1998. Paul was easily promoted to associate professor in 2005. In his last year at the University, he served as the department's director of Graduate Studies. Throughout, Paul was a popular undergraduate teacher and a much admired mentor to graduate students.
At Buffalo, Paul was consistently elected to the department's Advisory Committee, a high and unusual honor for such a young scholar. He was always an active and constructive citizen of the department. Paul readily took on search responsibilities, even in fields far removed from his own interests. Paul especially relished recruitment dinners. Early on, when he was a self-described “rookie,” he simply astonished his colleagues with his appetite for Buffalo wings. Even then, his lust for life was a joy to behold.
Given Paul's propensity for sauntering, it should not be surprising to learn that Paul also liked to “ponder.” This proclivity manifested itself in wondrous ways. At department colloquia, Paul almost never asked a question—until the very last moment, just as it appeared that we were done. In fact, it sometimes happened that a few of us were heading for the door when Paul would raise an important issue or make a telling point. This he always did in an intellectually honest and courteous way. Paul did not seem to have a mean bone in his body. In a department dominated by empiricists, it was soon noticed that no talk or presentation could end without Paul's final question. And later, on the rare occasion when Paul did not have a question, department members would require one from him. It was either that or the meeting would have to continue. Of course, Paul always obliged. There is perhaps no better indicator of the high esteem that his colleagues held for Paul than this playful ritual.
There are so many great “Paulie” stories to tell. One in particular took place when he was a graduate student at Binghamton and enrolled in a course on formal models and game theory. Early in the course an assignment was passed out that required the identification of the best strategy in a normal form game. Inexplicably, Paul chose a dominated strategy which, of course, is a strategy that is at least as bad and sometimes worse than some other strategy. Paul's reasoning was this choice would “surprise” the opponent. Paul shortly came to see the error of his ways. But the episode, which continues to provide his colleagues with a good laugh, says a lot about Paul who was always full of pleasant surprises.
Not surprising at all, however, was Paul's success as a scholar, especially to his colleagues at Buffalo who eagerly recruited him, eventually tenured him, and continue to hold him in high regard. Paul saw himself as a scholar of both conflict and peace. At the time of his death, Paul was an officer of the Peace Science Society (International). He was also an active member of the International Studies Association. He served on a number of important committees for both professional organizations.
Paul made several significant contributions to our understanding of interstate conflict processes. His first article, “Geographical Proximity and Issue Salience: Their Effects on the Escalation of Militarized Interstate Disputes,” which appeared in Conflict Management and Peace Science in 1996, was one of the earliest published studies demonstrating that territorial disputes are more conflict prone than non-territorial disputes. Analyzing the militarized interstate dispute (MID) data, which he had helped collect while at Binghamton, he found that territorial disputes are much more apt to result in fatalities than non-territorial disputes. This article was reprinted in a major collection on territory and war and has become one of the major cited studies on the topic.
Just before his untimely death, Paul returned to this theme and published in 2005 “Territory, Contiguity, and International Conflict: Assessing a New Joint Explanation” in the American Journal of Political Science. Some consider this study to be the definitive analysis of the role of contiguity and territory in that it shows that contiguity increases the probability of a militarized dispute, while territory is determinative of the type of militarized dispute that is most apt to escalate to war.
Paul had a variety of intellectual interests in international relations, although they all were related to peace science. In one of his first published articles, “Costs and Demands: International Sources of Dispute Initiation and Reciprocation,” which appeared in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1997, Paul established that system-level influences operate differently on the initiator and the target of international conflict, and that as the proportion of democratic states in the system rises, the number of disputes actually goes up. These and related results clearly challenged the conventional wisdom about how the international system conditions the incidence and escalation of international conflict.
Another thrust of Paul's research concerned the impact of domestic-level influences on foreign policy behavior. In a widely cited 1997 article in the Journal of Politics, “Between Dispute and War: The Effect of Joint Democracy on Interstate Conflict Escalation,” Paul demonstrated that disputes between two democratic rivals were no less likely to escalate than disputes between other combinations of states. Several other scholars have since confirmed this unanticipated result and have modified their theories accordingly. Paul, however, was the first to discover it.
Paul's 1999 International Studies Quarterly article, “Democracy and Maturity: Deciphering Conditional Effects on Levels of Dispute Intensity,” also brought an uncomfortable empirical regularity to the attention of complacent scholars. In this study Paul found that regime maturity had a greater dampening effect on the escalation of conflict than did regime type in general and democracy in particular. Paul sometimes referred to this characteristic as the “mature peace.”
A co-authored article with William Dixon, “Democracy, Disputes, and Negotiated Settlements,” published in 2002 in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, was Paul's third and final contribution to the literature of the democratic peace. In this article, Senese and Dixon show that a norms-based explanation is more powerful than an institutional account of why democracies are less belligerent toward one another. As with most of Paul's research, this is an important finding.
The article with Dixon can be considered a bridge with another theme of Paul's research: the stability of conflict resolution strategies. His most important contribution to this literature was a 2003 Journal of Politics article co-authored with Stephen Quackenbush entitled “Sowing the Seeds of Conflict: The Effect of Dispute Settlements on Durations of Peace.” This article has drawn a great deal of praise from Paul's professional colleagues. Some consider it his best work. In many ways it is typical of all of Paul's scholarship in the sense that it challenges our understanding of interstate conflict behavior. The theory of recurrent conflict that Senese and Quackenbush develop in this article is based on how different levels of satisfaction lead to different types of deterrence. By drawing this connection they were able to explain convincingly the empirical regularity they uncovered: imposed settlements last significantly longer than settlements that are reached in negotiations.
Paul's final focus—on territory, alliances, and the steps to war—occupied much of his recent work. Paul's strong interest in this topic led him to a rewarding collaboration with John Vasquez. The National Science Foundation supported their joint work with a research grant that commenced in 1999. They published three major studies together in the last three years.
The first, “A Unified Explanation of Territorial Conflict: Testing the Impact of Sampling Bias, 1919–1992,” which appeared in International Studies Quarterly in 2003, rebuts an important criticism of the territorial explanation of war. Through a two-stage analysis, this study shows that there is no selection bias at the first stage that would wipe out the relationship between territorial militarized disputes and escalation to war (at the second stage). Senese and Vasquez also show that one of the main factors increasing the probability of a MID in the first place is the presence of a territorial disagreement between states.
A second article, published in a collection of essays in 2004, examines the impact of having outside alliances while engaged in territorial disputes. In “Alliances, Territorial Disputes, and the Probability of War: Testing for Interactions,” Senese and Vasquez find a positive relationship between alliances and escalation to war in the 1816–1945 period, but not for the Cold War 1946–1992 period.
Senese and Vasquez's last published article, “Assessing the Steps to War,” appeared in the British Journal of Political Science in 2005. It tests a full-blown model of the steps to war explanation, and finds that the presence of territorial disputes, outside alliances, repeated militarized confrontations, and arms races are significant risk factors that increase the probability of war during the 1816–1945 period. Only territorial disputes and repeated confrontations are positively associated with war in the 1946–1992 period.
Recently, Paul's work with Vasquez focused on the post-Cold War period and a number of interaction models using newly updated MID data from the Correlates of War project. The fruit of this effort was about to ripen at the time of Paul's death. An all-but-completed book-length manuscript, The Steps to War: An Empirical Analysis, will undoubtedly be Paul's greatest gift to the academic community.
Paul's other gifts to his friends and colleagues, however, are even more profound. He touched our lives with his spirit, his determination, his courage, and his humanity. For those who wish to repay Paul in some small manner, the most appropriate way would be to simply think “happy thoughts” about him. This is all that Paul ever asked of his friends as his life drew to a close.
