Ted Robert Gurr

Biographical Information

"Ted Robert Gurr has a BA in social psychology from Reed College (1957) and a Ph.D. in government and international relations from New York University (1965). He has written ten single-authored and coauthored books and has edited or coedited ten others, including Why Men Rebel (Princeton University Press), which won the Woodrow Wilson Prize as the best US book in political science of 1970, and The Politics of Crime and Conflict: A Comparative History of Four Cities (Sage Publications, 1977). His writings on ethnopolitics include Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflict (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1993) and Early Warning of Communal Conflicts and Genocide: Linking Empirical Resarch to International Responses (United Nations University Press, 1996, with Barbara Harff). His most recent books on this topic are Preventive Measures: Building Risk Assessment and Crisis Early Warning Systems, (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, co-edited with John L. Davies) and Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century (U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2000).

"In 1993-94 Professor Gurr was president of the International Studies Association, representing 3000 members from more than 60 countries. Since 1994 he has been a senior consultant on the White House-initiated State Failure Task Force and a member of the steering committee of the Conflict Early Warning Systems Research Program of the International Social Science Council (UNESCO). He is founder and director of the Minorities at Risk project, based at Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management, which tracks and analyzes the status and conflicts of some 300 politically active communal groups throughout the world.

"Professor Gurr taught at Princeton University (1967-69), Northwestern University (1970-84; department chair,1977-80), and the University of Colorado (1985-89) before joining the University of Maryland faculty in 1989. He was designated Distinguished University Professor in 1995. He has held a Ford Foundation faculty fellowship (1970), a Guggenheim fellowship (1972-73), a German Marshall Fund senior fellowship (1976), and a Fulbright senior fellowship (1981). In 1988-89 he was a Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. In 1996-97 he held the Swedish government's Olof Palme Visiting Professorship at the University of Uppsala's Department of Peace and Conflict Research."