Gurr, Ted Robert 1936-

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GURR, Ted Robert 1936-

PERSONAL: Born February 21, 1936, in Spokane, WA; son of Robert Lucas and Anne (Cook) Gurr; married Erika Brigitte Klie (a research assistant), February 20, 1960 (died, May 6, 1980); married Barbara Harff (a political scientist), January 14, 1981; children: (first marriage) Lisa Anne, Andrea Mariel. Education: Reed College, B.A., 1957; Princeton University, additional study, 1958-59; New York University, Ph.D., 1965. Politics: Independent. Hobbies and other interests: Antiquities, travel, photography.

ADDRESSES: Home—485 College Ave., Boulder, CO 80302. Office—Department of Political Science, University of Maryland, 0145 Tydings Hall, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Educator and author. American Behavioral Scientist, Princeton, NJ, assistant to the editor, 1958-60, assistant editor, 1960-61, associate editor, 1963-64; Princeton University Center of International Studies, Princeton, NJ, research associate, 1965-67, faculty associate and assistant professor of political science, 1967-69; Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, associate professor, 1969-72, professor of political science, 1972-74, Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science, 1974-84, chairman of department, 1977-80; University of Colorado, Boulder, professor of political science and director of Center for Comparative Politics, 1985-89; University of Maryland, professor of political science, 1989—. Visiting assistant professor of political science, New York University, 1966-67; visiting fellow, Cambridge University Institute of Criminology, 1976; visiting scholar, La Trobe University, Australia, 1981. Codirector of task force on history of violence, National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1968-69; visiting professorship, University of Uppsala, Sweden, 1996-97.

MEMBER: International Peace Science Society, International Studies Association, International Society for the Study of Aggression (fellow), Social Science History Association, American Political Science Association, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson fellowship, 1957; Ford Foundation fellowship, 1970; Woodrow Wilson Foundation Prize from American Political Science Association, 1971, for Why Men Rebel; Guggenheim fellowship, 1972-73; German Marshall Fund senior fellowship, 1976; Fulbright senior research fellowship to Australia, 1981; United States Institute of Peace fellowship, 1988-89; University of Leiden research fellow, 1993.

WRITINGS:

(With Alfred de Grazia) American Welfare, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1961.

New Error-compensated Measures for Comparing Nations: Some Correlates of Civil Violence (monograph), Center of International Studies, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), 1966.

(With Charles Ruttenberg) The Conditions of Civil Violence: First Test of a Causal Model (monograph), Center of International Studies, Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), 1967.

(With Charles Ruttenberg) Cross-National Studies of Civil Violence, Center for Research in Social Systems, American University (Washington, DC), 1968.

(Editor and contributor with Hugh Davis Graham) Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1969, published as History of Violence in America, Praeger (New York, NY), 1969, revised edition, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills, CA), 1979.

Why Men Rebel, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1970.

(Editor, with Francisco J. Moreno) Basic Courses in Comparative Politics: An Anthology of Syllabi, Sage Publications for the International Studies Association (Beverly Hills, CA), 1970.

(With Muriel McClelland) Political Performance: A Twelve-Nation Study, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills, CA), 1971.

Politimetrics: An Introduction to Quantitative Macropolitics, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1972.

(Editor, with Ivo K. Feierabend and Rosalind Feierabend) Anger, Violence, and Politics, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1972.

(With Harry Eckstein) Patterns of Authority: A Structural Basis for Political Inquiry, Wiley-Interscience (New York, NY), 1975.

Rogues, Rebels, and Reformers: A Political History of Urban Crime and Conflict, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills, CA), 1976.

(With Peter N. Grabosky and Richard C. Hula) The Politics of Crime and Conflict: A Comparative History of Four Cities, Sage Publications (Beverly Hills, CA), 1977.

Comparative Studies of Political Conflict and Change, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1978.

(Editor and contributor) Handbook of Political Conflict: Theory and Research, Free Press (New York, NY), 1980.

The Quality of Life and Prospects for Change in Bermuda: A Report to the Government of Bermuda on a Sample Survey, Bermuda Press, 1984.

(Coauthor) The State and the City, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1987.

(Editor) Violence in America, Sage Publications (Newbury Park, CA), 1989.

(Coeditor) Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1991.

Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts, United States Institute of Peace Press (Washington, DC), 1993.

(Coauthor) Ethnic Conflict in World Politics, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1994.

(Coeditor) Preventive Measures: Building Risk Assessment and Crisis Early Warning Systems, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 1998.

Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century, United States Institute of Peace Press (Washington, DC), 2000.

(Coeditor) Journeys through Conflict: Narratives and Lessons, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2001.

Contributor to books, including World Politics and Tension Areas, edited by Feliks Gross, New York University Press, 1966; Law and Civil War in the Modern World, edited by Wolfgang Friedman and John Norton Moore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975; The Uses of Controversy in Sociology, edited by Lewis A. Coser and Otto N. Larsen, Free Press, 1976; The Politics of Terror: A Reader in Theory and Practice, edited by Michael Stohl, Dekker, 1978; Indicator Systems for Political, Economic, and Social Analysis, edited by Charles Taylor, Ölgeschlager, 1980; History and Crime: Implications for Criminal Justice Policy, edited by James A. Inciardi, Sage Publications, 1980; World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, 3rd edition, edited by Charles Taylor and David Jodice, Yale University Press, 1983; The Public and the Private, edited by Jan-Erik Lane, Sage Publications, 1985; Yearbook of State Violence and State Terrorism, edited by Michael Stohl and George Lopez, Greenwood Press, 1985; and Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, Volume III, 1981.

Coeditor, "Sage Professional Papers in Comparative Politics," Sage Publications, 1969-75. Associate editor of World Politics, 1967-68; Comparative Political Studies, member of editorial board, 1969—, editor, 1979-80.

SIDELIGHTS: Ted Robert Gurr is a professor of political science and the author of several books focusing on political violence, civil conflict, and ethnopolitics. In addition, Gurr has served as a policy-related consultant in various capacities, including the Lyndon Johnson Administration's National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence and the White House-initiated State Failure Task Force. Gurr was called as an expert witness for the defense in political trials in South Africa and has served as president of the International Studies Association. In the 1970s he began the Policy Project, which coded important information on political bodies throughout the world's independent states between 1800 through the 1970s, creating a databank used by scores of scholars studying democracies and autocracies.

Gurr's early writings center on civil violence and political conflict worldwide. His Why Men Rebel won the Woodrow Wilson Prize as the best U.S. book on political science in 1970. In the late 1980s Gurr began work on the Minorities at Risk Project, which he founded at Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management. The project follows and analyzes the status and conflicts of over 300 politically active communal groups worldwide. This work influenced most of his writings in the 1990s, including Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts. At the core of this book is a huge classification system, listing by region all 233 ethnocultural groups in the world that have had some kind of political rebellion since 1945. William J. Foltz of the American Political Science Review explained that Gurr codes such groups in five categories: "ethnonationalists, large groups with a history and dream of autonomy; indigenous peoples, conquered descendants of original inhabitants; ethnoclasses, low-status minorities descended from slaves or immigrants; militant sects, communities politically defined by religion; and communal contenders, culturally distinct groups seeking to retain or augment their share of the national pie." In addition to placing each group in a category, Gurr gauges how much political and economic difficulty they undergo, as well as determining the degree of cultural uniqueness relative to their country's society as a whole. As Ivan Light explained in his review of Minorities at Risk, "Gurr measures cultural difference on the basis of his evaluation of how different minorities are from the dominant culture in respect to ethnicity, language, religion, customs, historical origin, and residence patterns." Mahmood Monshipouri in Human Rights Quarterly called Minorities at Risk "an impressive and brilliant compilation." He also acknowledged that the book "is by far one of the most seminal and rigorous contributions in the area of ethnicity, politics, and human rights."

In 2000 Gurr published Peoples versus State: Minorities at Risk in the New Century, a follow-up to Minorities at Risk that includes statistical analyses of the conflicts. In this work Gurr notes that "by the mid 1990s armed conflict within states had abated: there was a pronounced decline in the onset of new ethnic wars and a shift in many ongoing wars from fighting to negotiation." The author then goes on to give his analysis of the reason for the decline, along with interesting empirical data for the ethnic groups he studied. Another feature of the book is the inclusion of several short stories of actual ethnic conflicts, such as the Copts in Egypt, and the Turks of Germany. According to Nikolas K. Gvosdev in the Journal of Church and State, Peoples versus State "is an extremely useful piece of scholarship, based on careful analysis." Gvosdev also commended Gurr for compiling a resource that "allows the reader to compare and contrast both the demands articulated by different minority groups as well as the differing responses of different types of regimes around the world."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Journal of Sociology, January, 1971; September, 1992, John A. Hall, review of Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century, p. 396.

American Political Science Review, March, 1971; December, 1992, Charles Tilly, review of Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century, p. 1984; June, 1994, William J. Foltz, review of Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts, p. 513.

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November, 1977; January, 1996, Radha Kumar, review of Ethnic Conflict in World Politics, p. 269.

Choice, December, 2000, P. Barton-Kriese, review of Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century, p. 777.

Commercial Appeal, August 29, 1999. p. B6.

Contemporary Sociology, September, 1977.

Foreign Affairs, November-December, 2000, p. 170.

Human Rights Quarterly, August, 1994, Mahmood Monshipouri, review of Minorities at Risk, pp. 580-584.

International Affairs, January, 2001, Amit Gupta, review of Peoples versus States, p. 194.

Journal of Church and State, autumn, 2000, Nikolas K. Gvosdev, review of Peoples versus State, p. 848.

Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, November, 2001, Roland Axtmann, review of Peoples versus States, p. 186.

Journal of Politics, August, 1973, November, 1977, February, 1978.

New York Times, July 30, 1969.

New York Times Book Review, April 12, 1970.

Political Science Quarterly, winter, 1988, Martin Shefler, review of The State and the City, p. 753.