Francis Beer


Francis A. Beer is an American Professor Emeritus of political science, University of Colorado at Boulder. His research focuses on war and peace. Honors and awards include listings in Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in America, as well as other directories. He was President of the International Studies Association/West and co-edited, with Ted Gurr at the University of Colorado, a series of Sage books on "Violence, Conflict, Cooperation." In addition to two Fulbright awards to France and the Netherlands he has received other awards from the Earhart Foundation, the Institute for World Order, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the University of Colorado, he represented the faculty as Chair of the Boulder Faculty Assembly.

Personal History

Francis A. Beer graduated from the Fay School and the Phillips Exeter Academy. He received his A. B. from Harvard in Government and M. A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
After leaving Harvard, he spent two years in the Philippines as a communications officer with the U.S. Navy, leaving with the rank of Lieutenant. He returned to the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed graduate work in Political Science. He specialized in international relations and received a Fulbright award to France to study the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and took a pre-doctoral year at the Mershon Center of the Ohio State University. He received another Fulbright award to the Netherlands to study the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He subsequently taught for many years at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Colorado in Boulder. At the University of Colorado, he served as Director of the Conflict and Peace Studies Program and as Chair of the Boulder Faculty Assembly. He was a visiting professor at Cambridge University in England and the University of Bordeaux in France.
He married his wife, Diana Darnall Beer before leaving Berkeley in 1965. His family includes two sons, a daughter, two daughters in law, and four grandsons.

Books and Monographs

Metaphorical World Politics .
Meanings of War and Peace..
Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations, Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman, Eds., 429 pp.
Peace against War: The Ecology of International Violence., 450 pp.
How Much War in History: Definitions, Estimates Extrapolations, and Trends., 40 pp.
The Political Economy of Alliances: Benefits, Costs, and Institutions in NATO., 40 pp.
Alliances: Latent War Communities in the Contemporary World, edited., 384 pp.
Integration and Disintegration in NATO: Processes of Alliance Cohesion and Prospects for Atlantic Community., 330 pp.