For more than 30 years, David Dessler, PhD, taught in the Department of Government at The College of William & Mary. The recipient of a Thomas Jefferson Teaching Award from the school while still an assistant professor, he soon achieved tenure and was elected faculty president by his colleagues. Dr. David Dessler’s expertise in international relations enabled him to build a strong archive of scholarly publications, including the groundbreaking article Beyond Correlations: Toward a Causal Theory of War, published in a 1991 issue of International Studies Quarterly.
Dr. Dessler used a classic — and still ongoing — body of research as the jumping-off point for his survey of the academic study of war. He began by noting the real contributions that have come out of the Correlates of War (COW) project, which first developed under political scientist J. David Singer at the University of Michigan and continues at The Pennsylvania State University (PSU). This distinguished project works to amass in one place the full range of systemic, scientific studies of war. The COW project anchors its work in accepted principles of meticulous documentation, data reliability, and replication.
The COW project continues to focus on systematizing the previous less-structured assemblage of its original materials and supporting its robust collection of cross-border datasets, even as it develops partnerships with scholars across the globe. The project and its holdings moved under PSU’s direction in 2001.
Dr. Dessler’s article noted the dogged, forward-looking work of the COW project with gratitude, citing it as among the most ambitious projects of its time in the arena of social science research. His article then proceeded to place it at the opening of a critique demonstrating how modern researchers’ correlational study of war had as yet failed to become a consolidated, easily accessible system and missed opportunities to achieve its potential for explaining the true underlying causes of war within a rigorous framework like that of the natural sciences.
David Dessler 
