Stephen Van Evera
Born (1948-11-10) November 10, 1948 (age 75)
Alma materUC Berkeley College of Letters and Science
Scientific career
FieldsPolticial science
InstitutionsMIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Stephen William Van Evera (born 10 November 1948) is a professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing in international relations. His research includes U.S. foreign and national security policy as well as causes and prevention of war. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[1]

Biography

Van Evera received his A.B. in government from Harvard and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1980s he was managing editor of the journal International Security.

Van Evera is the author of Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Cornell, 1999). He has also co edited Nuclear Diplomacy and Crisis Management (1990), Soviet Military Policy (1989), and The Star Wars Controversy (1986).

Academic work

Van Evera is considered a defensive realist, which is a branch of structural realism.[2]

Offense–defense theory

In Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict, Van Evera proposed offense–defense theory, which attempts to discern what factors increase the likelihood of war. Van Evera states three main hypotheses:

  1. War will be more common in periods when conquest is easy, or is believed to be easy, than in other periods.
  2. States that have, or believe they have, large offensive opportunities or defensive vulnerabilities will initiate and fight more wars than other states.
  3. Actual examples of true imbalances are rare and explain only a moderate amount of history.

However, false perceptions of these factors are common and thus explain a great deal of history. Van Evera wrote on these factors being causal in the outbreak of the World War I in a famous 1984 article.[3] Although trench warfare and the development of the machine gun meant that defensive strategies should have prevailed, many European nations were under the illusion that conquest was easy or that they were valuable.[4][clarification needed] This misconception resulted in a drawn-out and bloody conflict. Recent discussion in international relations theory questions the idea of explaining the outbreak of World War I in terms of a 'cult of the offensive': with evidence showing that war planners – German ones especially – before 1914 being well aware of the heavy casualties implicit in offensive operations.[5]

Process-tracing tests for affirming causal inferences

In his 1997 book Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science, Van Evera authored an influential typology of process-tracing tests which distinguishes tests depending on how they adjudicate between theoretical expectations in qualitative research:[6][7][8][9]

References

  1. ^ "Council on Foreign Relations".
  2. ^ Stephen Walt, "International Relations: One World, Many Theories," Foreign Policy 110 (Spring 1998), 29-45.
  3. ^ Van Evera, Stephen (1984). "The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War". International Security. 9 (1): 58–107. doi:10.2307/2538636. ISSN 0162-2889. JSTOR 2538636.
  4. ^ Lieber, Keir A. (2007-10-01). "The New History of World War I and What It Means for International Relations Theory". International Security. 32 (2): 165 et seq. doi:10.1162/isec.2007.32.2.155. ISSN 0162-2889. S2CID 53553642.
  5. ^ Snyder, Jack; Lieber, Keir A. (2008). "Defensive Realism and the "New" History of World War I". International Security. 33 (1): 187. doi:10.1162/isec.2008.33.1.174. ISSN 0162-2889. S2CID 57558984.
  6. ^ Bennett, Andrew (2008-08-21). Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M; Brady, Henry E; Collier, David (eds.). "Process Tracing: a Bayesian Perspective". The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199286546.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-928654-6. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  7. ^ Van Evera, Stephen (1997). Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-5444-8. JSTOR 10.7591/j.ctvrf8bm7.
  8. ^ Collier, David (2011). "Understanding Process Tracing". PS: Political Science & Politics. 44 (4): 823–830. doi:10.1017/S1049096511001429. ISSN 1049-0965.
  9. ^ Gerring, John (2017). "Qualitative Methods". Annual Review of Political Science. 20 (1): 15–36. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-092415-024158. ISSN 1094-2939.

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