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A Tribute to Richard N. Rosecrance, Former Director of the Burkle Center

Richard N. Rosecrance, who died on March 7, 2024 at 93, was a formidable scholar, institution builder, and teacher who played a critical role in the field of international relations in two stints on the UCLA faculty.

 

Richard N. Rosecrance, who died on March 7, 2024 at 93, was a formidable scholar, institution builder, and teacher who played a critical role in the field of international relations in two stints on the UCLA faculty. Dick taught at UCLA from 1958¬¬ to 1968, during the first decade of his academic career. He directed the Security Studies Project (which ran from 1961–1969). He followed his UCLA years with service on the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State and professorships at Berkeley and Cornell before returning to UCLA in the mid-1980s for almost two decades. During this turn at UCLA, he directed the Center for International Relations and its reinauguration as the Burkle Center for International Relations. Dick played a prominent role in the creation of the School of Public Policy and Social Research (what has since become the Luskin School of Public Affairs), with which he was then affiliated. Following his retirement from UCLA, Dick became an adjunct professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where he directed the U.S.–China Relations Project.

Dick had a wide-ranging intellect that traversed the field of international relations as he applied his tremendous analytic skill to develop, criticize, synthesize, and apply scholarly arguments. He wrote seminal works on international relations theory and international systems, nuclear deterrence and proliferation, interdependence and globalization, multilateral cooperation, and the rise and decline of great powers. He was deeply knowledgeable about historical international relations as well as contemporary politics. His key works included: Action and Reaction in World Politics: International Systems in Perspective, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (translated into Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, German, and Indonesian), and The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Century (translated into Japanese, Chinese, German, Arabic, French, and Spanish). He also edited and co-edited major works opening up important areas for inquiry. These included The Dispersion of Nuclear Weapons: Strategy and Politics (ed.), The Future of the International Strategic System (ed.), The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (co-ed., translated into Chinese), and History and Neorealism (co-ed.).

Dick was prepared to use his knowledge of history and theory to advance policy prescriptions, as in his prescient America’s Economic Resurgence: a Bold New Strategy, which was published in 1990, The Costs of Conflict: Prevention and Cure in the Global Arena (co-ed.), and The Resurgence of the West: How a Transatlantic Union Can Prevent War and Restore the United States and Europe. He was prepared to contemplate alternative international political arrangements, as in The New Great Power Coalition: Toward a World Concert of Nations (co-ed.), and in Power and Restraint: A Shared Vision for the U.S.-China Relationship (co-ed.). His works emphasized the implications of historical change, as in The Rise of the Trading State, and the role of historical analogues, as in The Next Great War?: The Roots of World War I and the Risk of U.S.-China Conflict (co-ed.).

These partial lists incorporate contributions to the fields of security studies, foreign policy, and international political economy in works that emphasize the roles of both domestic and international forces for change. They also reveal Dick’s applications of social science in developing strategies for dealing with current challenges. Understanding the implications of modernization and its potential to produce greater prosperity and avoid war and chaos was a major focus of his career. He was a student of world affairs who thought about the implications of current events and the puzzles they pose to our conventional understanding.

Dick received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, Fulbright, and NATO fellowships, among others. He held research and teaching appointments at the European University Institute in Florence, the Institut de Sciences Politiques in Paris, the London School of Economics, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, King’s College London, and at the Australian National University.

Under his directorship in the 1990s, the UCLA Center raised funds from the Pew Charitable Trusts for an Economics and Security Project and grants from the Hewlett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. Dick was the Center’s director when it secured an endowment from Ronald Burkle and became the Burkle Center for International Relations.

The wide-ranging set of his writings constitutes only part of his impact on the field. Dick encouraged and empowered his students. He directed dissertations ranging across the subfields of international relations: strategy and security, foreign policy and grand strategy, and international political economy. With his encouragement, his students, many of them now prominent scholars, pursued a variety of perspectives and approaches – becoming realists, neoclassical realists, liberal internationalists, and constructivists. His PhD students include those who became presidents of the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association (of which he was also president).

We mourn his passing deeply and miss his wit, wisdom, intellectual prodding, and encouragement.