Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Courses:

PSC 129  American National Government & Politics (Honors)

PSC 356  Political Conflict

Recent Publications:

Pragmatic Constructivism.” Millennium. Forthcoming.

“Conflicting Identities: Solidary Incentives in the Serbo-Croatian War.” Journal of Peace Research. 39 (2002): 69-90, with Nicole Lindstrom.

"Give Structure Its Due: Political Agency and the Vietnam Commitment Decisions." Japanese Journal of Political Science. 2 (2001): 171-185.

“Language Games: Dialogical Analysis of INF Negotiations.” International Studies Quarterly. 42 (1998): 271-294, with Brian K. Frederking and Seth A. Tucker.

Web Page: Gavan Duffy's Home Page

Research Projects:

Professor Duffy’s dialogical analysis applies the inferential techniques of linguistic pragmatics to recover implicit contents of texts. These implicit contents, the text’s implicit contents, and propositions that represent the background context serve as inputs to a formal analysis that models the practical reasoning of political actors. Professor Duffy has presented small, paper-and-pencil demonstrations of the method in his recent papers. Two former Ph.D. students applied the method to larger cases in their dissertations, one of which has since appeared as a book. Professor Duffy is currently engaged in a large project with Evelyn Goh, his student at Oxford in 1999 and currently on the faculty of Signapore’s Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies. They are analyzing diplomatic conversations between Kissinger, Mao, and Zhou, which led to the “opening” to China in the early 1970s. Professor Duffy plans in future to implement the dialogical method within computational environments he developed earlier in his career.

With Nathalie Frensley, his doctoral student at Texas, Professor Duffy developed a theoretical model of conflict processes based on the choices that face political leaders in conflict settings. Although their published work applied the theory to the conflict in Northern Ireland, students have applied the Duffy-Frensley model to dozens of political conflicts throughout world history. Drawing upon theories of rational political participation, Professor Duffy has elaborated the Duffy-Frensley model in investigations into the processes of mobilizing mass political constituencies for conflict and demobilizing them for peace. With SU Ph.D. student Nicole Lindstrom, Professor Duffy applied this understanding of mobilization and demobilization to the history of the recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and considered its implications for peacemaking.