Michael D. McGinnis Webpage

Michael D. McGinnis

Professor, Political Science, and

Co-Director, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis,

Indiana University

I am a product of the Big Ten and the Cold War. While growing up on a farm in northwestern Ohio, I never imagined going to school anyplace other than Ohio State. I went up north to Minnesota for graduate study and south to Indiana University for my first (and so far only) academic job. This gives me a unique perspective on IU, which, at a mere 35,000 students, is by far the smallest university I have known.

I may have lived all my life in the Midwest, but I've always been fascinated with world politics. The Cold War reached all the way into rural America. I well remember the "duck and cover" drills in which we pretended to learn how to survive a nuclear war. I still have vivid memories of maps with menacing splotches of red that signified the expanding Communist threat. From an early age I have been fascinated by maps, and by math. My career plans never crystallized until I realized you can use math to study politics.

In my Ph.D. dissertation, I modeled the way in which rival regional powers cozied up to the superpowers to get access to arms and military assistance. For my next project I turned to the superpowers themselves, using rational expectations models and time-series statistics. Frankly, I was inconvenienced by the end of the Cold War. Among other things, I had to abandon my newly designed courses on such suddenly irrelevant topics as nuclear strategy and strategic arms control.

Currently, I study humanitarian intervention in war and famine, with a particular interest in the Horn of Africa. I want to understand how the international humanitarian aid organizations that save lives by providing food and other emergency assistance can also serve to perpetuate conflict by providing aid and comfort to the warlords and governments who routinely restrict access to food as part of their military strategy. This brutal kind of war is a far cry from the carefully sanitized vision of nuclear war that we were taught in the early days of the Cold War. My most fervent hope is that this region will soon achieve peace, and thereby force this student of international conflict to again look elsewhere for a new topic to study.

General Info Research Teaching Service

Last Modified: 9 Nov. 2003
URL http://mypage.iu.edu/~mcginnis/