Michael Brecher, R. B. angus professor of political science at McGill University, died on January 16, 2022 at the age of 96. There are so many academic fields on which Michael left his mark, and so many scholars with whom he collaborated, consulted, and whom he befriended over the years, that it is quite a daunting task to write about his remarkable career. Jon began a long collaboration with Michael in 1975, Hemda Ben Yehuda joined them in 1977, Pat joined shortly thereafter in 1980, and Kyle in 2006.
By ‘team,’ we mean the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, which Michael founded in 1975 and led or co-led for the next 45 years. During this remarkable time, Michael authored or co-authored 29 books and over 110 articles and chapters, the majority on all dimensions of international crises; including onset, escalation, de-escalation, and outcome. Somewhere, there is a list of the more than 100 students who worked on the project over the years. Many have now become academic scholars themselves. Like Michael himself, two of these young ICB colleagues (Etel Solingen and Patrick James) went on to become presidents of the International Studies Association. Mark Boyer, another ICB-er early in his career, currently serves as the Executive Director of ISA. Many others have excelled in their respective academic work and have now generated their own academic followings.
Many of the students Michael taught were soon drawn into elaborate theoretical brainstorming sessions led by Michael, but always open to innovative contributions, extending the frontiers of research in new directions. Among the many seminar-generated early ICB innovations was the shift from actor perceptions to systems analysis in shaping policy and an emphasis on the important relationship between the two. Such informal and creative discussions had profound effects on the academic careers of those who were lucky to have Michael as a mentor. His contributions stretched across the globe, from Israel to the US, Canada, and beyond. The search for new research puzzles, the need for sound empirical support, and the value of joint quality scholarship and ongoing friendships became major takeaways which Michael passed on to the following generations of scholars who naturally followed his traditions and values, leaving a profound imprint on academia.
Michael began his career with an appointment to the department of economics and political science at McGill (later just political science) in 1952. There, he joined his brother Irving Brecher, a renowned economist. Michael did his doctoral work at Yale, while Irving did his at Harvard. Michael taught at McGill until his reluctant retirement in 2020, a remarkable stretch of 69 years—a feat that will be difficult for any scholar to match.
Michael started as a South Asia scholar. Among his early books were The Struggle for Kashmir (Oxford 1953), Nehru: A Political Biography (Oxford 1959), The New States of Asia (Oxford 1963), Succession in India: A Study of Decision Making (Oxford 1966), India in World Politics (Oxford 1968), and Political Leadership in India: An Analysis of Elite Attitudes (Praeger 1969).
He then switched gears, and having taken up part time residence in Israel, wrote two remarkable books on Israeli foreign policy: The Foreign Policy System of Israel: Setting, Images, Process (Oxford and Yale 1972, winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association), and Decisions in Israel’s Foreign Policy (Oxford and Yale, 1974).
It was in 1975 that Michael founded the International Crisis Behavior Project, in collaboration with Jon Wilkenfeld and their graduate students in the international relations department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this project, still alive and well under the direction of Kyle Beardsley and Pat James, Michael and Jon broke fresh ground in the analysis of crisis, conflict, and war. Their innovation took the form of an intensive inquiry into seven enduring topics/themes: polarity, geography, ethnicity, democracy, protracted conflict, violence, and third party intervention. These distinct analytic categories were guided by models from which hypotheses were derived and tested against the voluminous evidence generated by the ICB Project, which today covers all crises from 1918 to 2017 – 485 crises, 1015 crisis actors, and almost 200 variables at both the actor and system levels of analysis. Their leading book on the subject, A Study of Crisis (Michigan 1997) will be released as an open source ebook in spring 2022.
The objectives of these analyses were twofold: theory construction through a rigorous and systematic search for patterns of turmoil in this 100-year span of world history, and an indirect contribution to world order through the generation of knowledge to be communicated to policymakers and the attentive public alike about the pervasive phenomenon of crisis in the global system.
During the years of the ICB Project, Michael authored or co-authored a remarkable 18 books on the subject of crisis in the international system. The most recent of his books were International Political Earthquakes (Michigan 2008), The World of Protracted Conflicts (Lexington 2016), The Dynamics of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Palgrave 2017), and A Century of Conflict and Crisis in the International System (Palgrave 2018). Remarkably, a year before his death, Michael was negotiating with the University of Michigan Press for a book to be titled Secessionist Movements—State Conflict!
Among the many awards Michael received over the years were the Distinguished Scholar Award—Foreign Policy Section of the International Studies Association in 1995, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Political Science Association-Conflict Processes Section 2009. And as a political scientist, he received the Watumull Prize of the American Historical Society for his book on Nehru in 1960.
Remarkably, through all of this unbelievable scholarly productivity, Michael also managed to be one of the most esteemed teachers, mentors, and dissertation directors. He held visiting professorships at the Hebrew University, Stanford, Berkeley, and Chicago. He was a demanding co-author, going through multiple formulations of theory upon which both qualitative and quantitative analyses were based. He had a unique writing style, often typified by an aversion to ending sentences. He wrote clearly and carefully, able to move back and forth from the prose necessary to describe the lives and works of leading political figures like Nehru, Ben Gurion, and Sadat, to the more technical style required to convey complex statistical results.
Michael stands among the memorable figures in our field and his legacy will continue to expand. He is greatly missed by all of us, his family, and the wider academic world. ■
