J. David Singer, a globally recognized scholar of international politics, died Monday, December 28, 2009, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was involved in an auto accident on September 22 and had been hospitalized since. At the time of his death, Singer was Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he'd been on the faculty from 1958 until retiring in 2002. He was 84 years old.
Professor Singer was a pioneer in the scientific study of international politics. He was a vigorous advocate for research that was systematic, replicable, and based on empirical evidence. Of the scholars most frequently credited with the development of the quantitative empirical study of war, from Quincy Wright to Karl Deutsch (two of Singer's heroes and models), the contributions of J. David Singer to the scientific study of war are considered to be paramount.
Born in Brooklyn on December 7, 1925, his sixteenth birthday coincided with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The next year, Singer enlisted in the U.S. Navy as an aviation cadet. He served as a deck officer on the USS Missouri at the end of World War II and on the USS Newport News during the Korean War. In return for his military service, the G.I. Bill provided the education that led Singer to commit his career to ending the violence he witnessed as a citizen and in the Navy. He received his undergraduate degree from Duke University in 1946, where he also played tight-end on the football team. After serving in Korea, he went on to receive his Ph.D. from New York University in 1956. He was later a Ford Fellow at the University of Iowa, an instructor at Vassar College, a visiting Fellow at Harvard University, and a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
During his early career, Singer referred to himself as a “policy wonk and a public activist.” His initial interest in international organizations, evidenced in his dissertation's focus on budgetary policies of the United Nations, rapidly shifted toward a more serious examination of American foreign policy and, in particular, the U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy. Singer's rejection of the dominant deterrence paradigm led to his being invited to testify before Senator Hubert Humphrey's subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations in 1956, where he presented a novel plan for nuclear disarmament. Throughout his life, Singer espoused the belief that academics had an obligation to bring their expertise to bear on discussions on important contemporary political issues. His activism led most notably to his outspoken opposition to American involvement in the war in Vietnam. Singer's aversion to the concept of academic neutrality also led to his involvement in the Caucus for a New Political Science, which tried to promote policy relevance within the American Political Science Association. Singer served on the editorial board of the caucus journal for many years.
After serving as a visiting assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Michigan from 1958–60, he was appointed to the position of senior scientist at Michigan's Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI) in 1961, a position he held until 1983. MHRI brought together some of the world's leading scientists from many different disciplines (e.g., Kenneth Boulding, Anatol Rappoport, Herbert Kelman), who were dedicated to “general systems theory” and the pursuit of understanding system level processes that guide human behavior in all facets of life (e.g., biological, political, economic). Although Professor Singer's dissertation and early publications on financing international organizations were, in his own words, “pre-scientific,” it was in these years that he joined the behavioral revolution in the social sciences and quickly became one of its leaders. His seminal article, “The Levels of Analysis Problem in International Relations” in World Politics (1961), a staple of graduate course syllabi, refined and developed the idea that international phenomena could be analyzed at different levels of aggregation (e.g., subnational, national, regional, systemic), and that different processes might operate in different ways at each level. Several other influential articles followed, including “The Relevance of the Behavioral Sciences to the Study of International Relations” (Behavioral Science, 1961), “Inter-Nation Influence: A Formal Model” (American Political Science Review, 1963), and “Multipolar Power Systems and International Stability” (with Karl Deutsch; World Politics, 1964). With his reputation as an emerging leader in the field, Singer rejoined Michigan's department of political science as a tenured associate professor in 1964, about to embark on the research project that would consume his attention for the next 45 years and cement his standing as one of the giants of the field.
Professor Singer is best known as founder of the Correlates of War (COW) Project, dedicated to the systematic accumulation of scientific knowledge about military conflict in order to end it. The project had its genesis in a 1963 grant from the Carnegie Corporation to the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, a portion of which went to Singer for the study of war. Singer and his associate, historian Melvin Small, wanted to develop a typology of war based on the characteristics of its participants. They, along with Bruce Russett, generated the project's first database, which consisted of a list of all the state members of the interstate system. Singer and Small then went on to develop the first of their datasets on wars, which described the frequency, participants, duration, and battle deaths of all interstate wars since 1816. Singer's goal was to produce generalizations about the conditions associated with the onset, magnitude, and severity of war in order to inform security policy and ultimately facilitate more peaceful international relations. Singer and Small's early and influential book from the COW Project in 1972, The Wages of War (Wiley, 1972), established a standard definition of war that has since guided the research of hundreds of scholars. A follow-up book, Resort to Arms (Sage, 1982), updated that work and provided new data on international and civil wars. Those war data and the companion Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) dataset, which documented all militarized international conflict since 1816, became by far the most used and cited collections in the scholarly literature over the next three decades.
Singer, with his coauthors, the late Stuart Bremer and John Stuckey, wrote “Capability Distribution, Uncertainty, and Major Power War, 1820–1965,” a chapter in Peace, War, and Numbers, edited by Bruce Russett and published in 1972. This pathbreaking study showed how multivariate statistical analysis could extract patterns of conflict behavior at the system level from the COW data. In particular, it tested the classic question of whether power preponderance or balance leads to peace in the international system.
COW later expanded its collection efforts to include data on a wide variety of national and systemic attributes, including alliances; diplomatic ties; geographic proximity; territorial changes; intergovernmental organizations; trade; conflict location; cultural attributes; and the military, economic, and demographic dimensions of power (many of these efforts are described in Measuring the Correlates of War, coauthored with Paul Diehl; University of Michigan Press, 1991). In 1976, Francis Hoole and Dina Zinnes published Quantitative International Politics: An Appraisal (Praeger, 1976), which reviewed the major data-based research projects in international relations at the time. More than three decades later, only the COW Project remains an active enterprise. Singer turned the directorship of the project over to the late Stuart Bremer of Penn State University in 2001 and then subsequently to Paul Diehl of the University of Illinois, with whom it remains today. The newest version of the war datasets, including updates and new data on nonstate wars, appears in Meredith Reid Sarkees and Frank Wayman's Resort to War, 1816–2007 (CQ Press, 2010).
The COW Project was more than data collection, and Professor Singer never saw data collection as an end in itself, but rather as an important step in scientific research. His initial goal was to systematically test propositions derived from realist thought that, at the time, were little more than conjecture or conventional wisdom. Singer was a prolific author who produced, alone and with coauthors, more than 120 articles in academic journals, as well over 20 books and edited volumes over his long career. Much of that work and the approaches underlying it were summarized in The Correlates of War I and II (Free Press, 1979 and 1980) and Nations at War (with Daniel Geller; Cambridge University Press, 1998). Yet Singer often indicated that among his greatest joys, and indeed his greatest impact, lay with the graduate students and senior scholars associated with the COW Project over the years. The broader COW Project family has produced hundreds of books and articles on war and related subjects.
In its early years, the COW Project and Singer were criticized for being mechanistic, ahistorical, and lacking context, among other alleged sins. The field of world politics—the term Singer preferred to “international relations”—came to appreciate his desire to see arguments in the field tested using reproducible data across many cases as a central strategy for the accumulation of knowledge. Although not all such studies use COW data, the idea that researchers should test their arguments across many cases, rather than just a few case studies selected by the researcher, is widely accepted today. While other projects were also collecting data across time and space at the same time, it is hard to imagine that large-n statistical research in world politics would have taken hold without the COW Project.
Singer's reputation and his enthusiasm for recruiting scholars to the field of peace research led him to accept numerous appointments abroad at such institutions as the Institute for Social Research; the Institute for International Affairs in Norway; the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland; the University of Mannheim in Germany; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies; the International Institute for Peace, University of Groningen, The Netherlands; and the National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan. His achievements brought him honorary degrees from Northwestern University and Binghamton University. He also received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conflict Processes section of the APSA and the Founder's Medal from the Peace Science Society, and he served as president of the Peace Science Society (International) and the International Studies Association (ISA).
As a scholar, it was Singer's goal to produce rigorous, reliable research and contribute to the larger academic project of honing methodology, improving theory, and perfecting results. Singer's larger and more visionary goal, however, was to generate explanatory knowledge about the causes of war that could, in practice, be applied to the purpose of eliminating it. Over the years, Singer repeatedly expressed his hope that scientifically derived knowledge on war would be used by government leaders to produce better policy and minimize human suffering. Indeed, his marked advice to his doctoral students was that good research must be driven by policy-relevant concerns, and that scholars had an obligations to report and frame their results so as to inform policymakers, a position forcefully stated in his ISA presidential address, “The Responsibilities of Competence in the Global Village” (International Studies Quarterly, 1985).
Singer served as a consultant to the Department of State, Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, and, most recently, to the U.S. Strategic Command 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. During his years at the University of Michigan, he received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the World Society Foundation, and the U.S. Institute for Peace. He remained active in scholarly pursuits until his death, serving as chair of the COW Project Advisory Board, publishing articles on international conflict, presenting at conferences, and working on his memoirs.
Although Singer was outspoken on a number of epistemological and political matters, it was always in the service of his belief in open debate, scientific standards, and fairness. He was a man of strong opinions and believed that we should all advance our views, scientific and personal, with passion and conviction. His manner was avuncular with some, blunt with others. His reputation for outspokenness also belied his enormous and not widely known generosity to his friends and students. He had a proclivity for “collecting” a coterie of interesting people from a variety of backgrounds as long as they had thoughtful perspectives to contribute to a discussion. Singer helped make Ann Arbor a regular stop for international visitors by generously hosting dinners at his house. His home was also the product of Singer's craftsmanship, reclamation of vintage materials, and commitment to the environment. He loved and enjoyed the pleasures of life, particularly a good cigar.
In addition to his prominence in the field, Singer was also a gifted teacher. Singer's teaching style was lively and freewheeling. He was always honest in his assessments, but he remained open to discussing them. Singer often exhorted that, “if we, from our privileged position in the academy, cannot be completely honest with one another, who can be?” His success as a teacher is most visible at the graduate level. He inspired, mentored, and challenged two generations of Ph.D. students who would go on to become leaders in the field. He also generously proffered his support to graduate students and junior faculty at other institutions, inviting them to spend summers or sabbaticals working with him on the COW Project. His commitment to undergraduate education, however, is equally notable. Singer welcomed a large number of undergraduate research assistants into the project. Singer's efforts with undergraduates continued after he became an emeritus professor. He remained a devoted mentor to large numbers of undergraduates and played an active role in the University's Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.
Singer's commitment to undergraduate education was not limited to the classroom. He served as faculty advisor and sometimes coach of the Michigan Ski Club. He opened his home to undergraduates on a regular basis. Singer also shared his lifetime passion of sailing with his students. Up until his eightieth birthday, when he gave up his boat, Singer could be seen sailing his Snipe on Barton Pond with a crew of undergraduates or former students.
Singer's former students range far and wide on both theoretical and methodical lines. He took special pride in the women and minority students he taught and mentored. In his later years, Singer enjoyed discussing former students who went on to successful careers in political science. He also took pride in those who pursued other paths. He would smile and reflect on the activist Tom Hayden or Gaylen Byker, the president of Calvin College. When Hayden returned to Ann Arbor to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first teach-in, which Singer played a part in organizing in 1965, Hayden's plenary speech ran over 15 minutes. Upon completion, Hayden went directly to greet Singer. After a warm embrace, Singer responded in his characteristic style: “Tom, you can still blow a lot of hot air. You went 15 minutes over.” Singer's concern was that Hayden's excess shortened the break-out sessions with students, in which Singer and Hayden would lead smaller group discussions. Even nearing his eightieth year, Singer still cherished his opportunities to have freewheeling discussions with undergraduates.
Writing reflections on his own life, Singer concluded that, “in his teaching, his research, and political activism he tried to set a good example for his colleagues and students, and as we can now say, he was moderately successful. On the other hand, his vision is far from achieved. The peace science endeavor still has a long way to go.” He was far too humble in gauging the magnitude of his impact on the international relations discipline and the students who studied with him. He was perhaps accurate in noting that peace science still has a long way to go, but the journey is now much shorter and with clear direction because of J. David Singer.
J. David Singer is survived by his wife, Diane Macaulay of Ann Arbor, Michigan, his daughters Annie Singer of Washington, DC, and Katie Singer of Montclair, New Jersey, and his two grandchildren, Kayla and Jake Ephros of Montclair. A public memorial service was held in June 2010 in Ann Arbor.
