James Lee Ray

Department of Political Science
Professor Emeritus

Ray, author of Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition (University of South Carolina Press, 1995, 1998), is also the author of Global Politics, (10 editions), and American Foreign Policy and Political Ambition, with a second edition published in 2014. His published work has focused on the causes of war and interstate conflict, as well as various methodological and epistemological issues. His recent article on “Power Concentration and Interstate Conflict: Is There a Connection” (with Patrick Bentley) reviews research relying on a measure of the concentration of power in the international system that he devised (with J. David Singer), that continues to appear regularly in published work more than 35 years after its appearance (in 1973). He has served as the President of the Peace Science Society, and is a winner of Vanderbilt’s Ernest Jones Faculty Adviser Award.