Benjamin Allison

Benjamin V. Allison is a PhD candidate (ABD) at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Graduate Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security. He is an international historian of the Middle East, the Cold War, and US foreign policy. He also studies terrorism, insurgency, and proxy war. He works with Jeremi Suri. 

Ben’s dissertation sits at the intersection of inter-Arab politics and great power competition. It bolsters our understanding of each through research on three continents and in four languages. Through the Cracks of Détente examines the final chapter of the Cold War in the Middle East by focusing on relations between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front (Jabhat al-Sumud wa-al-Tassadi). The Front included Syria, Algeria, Libya, South Yemen, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and was founded to oppose the Egyptian-Israeli peace process in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on sources in Arabic, Bulgarian, and Russian, he reveals how the Steadfastness Front helped prevent the expansion of the bilateral Egyptian-Israeli peace process into a comprehensive Arab-Israeli one, accelerated the securitization of US policy toward the Middle East, contributed to the collapse of Soviet-American détente, and fragmented the Arab world. 

Ben’s scholarly work has been published by Cold War History, Perspectives on Terrorism, the International Centre for Counter-terrorism (The Hague).  He has also written numerous scholarly book reviews and encyclopedia entries, and is a book review editor for H–Diplo. 

His public-facing work has appeared in  Foreign Policy,  TIME,  Lawfare,  Inkstick,  The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, Not Even Past, and elsewhere. Ben also regularly appears on  LiveNOW from FOX to provide historically-informed analysis of current events, particularly as they relate to US foreign policy and the Middle East.