Having spent four of his early adult years in the Marines, Dennis Sandole opted for an alternative career trajectory and in 1968 joined the Ph.D. program at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, where he remained as first a master's and then a Ph.D. student until gaining his doctorate in 1979. At the time, the program was run by the charismatic Richard Rose, who was one of the few politics and government scholars of that era to believe in a social scientific approach to studying politics, peace, and security, so his Department was unusually accommodating to the new ideas of modeling, measurement, and the statistical testing of ideas. Dennis Sandole’s initial interest in simulation and gaming fitted well into the Department, but it was also almost inevitable that he should have been affected by the ambience at Strathclyde and become eventually one of the more numerate and rigorous of the conflict research fraternity.
While completing his doctorate in Scotland, Sandole’s own teaching career took off in many directions. He took up the position of Lecturer in International Relations (IR) down at University College London, becoming a member of John Burton’s Centre for the Analysis of Conflict there, teaching courses in research methods, international theory and foreign policy analysis to master's and undergraduate students. In the same period, he spent much of the 1970s teaching on the two European based master's programs in IR run for the US military by the University of Southern California. This necessitated regular travel from London to Germany and weekly journeys to many of the US air bases scattered round East Anglia.
In the summer of 1981, Dennis Sandole returned to the USA to join Director Bryant Wedge and Assistant Director Henry Barringer as the first formal teaching appointments to the brand new Center for Conflict Resolution (CCR) at the new and expanding George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. At the time, this was a joint appointment with the Department of Politics and International Relations, but much of the central teaching role for the first M.S. program rested with Sandole. The three founders were responsible for the survival and the growth of what became the Institute and then the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.
Eventually Sandole’s appointment was transferred completely over to CCR, and amid his teaching he was also able to begin the first of the stream of distinguished publications that continue until this day. These started with the collection of papers derived from many of the courses then taught at CCR, for example, Conflict Management and Problem Solving: Interpersonal to International Applications. The subtitle of the work gives the clue to Sandole’s wide ranging interests in the field, which have ranged from neurological sources of human behavior, through foreign policy decision making and arms control arrangements to generic theories of international conflict, practical methods of conflict control, and the dynamics of international cooperation. His many projects while at George Mason attest to Dennis Sandole’s eclecticism and to his impact on many parts of the field of conflict analysis and resolution and on the search for peace and stability, regionally and globally.
JB/CRM
