The Mershon Center for International Security Studies was saddened by the recent death of one of our former affiliates, researchers, and directors. Born July 13, 1948, J. Craig Jenkins died October 20, 2026, at the age of 78.

A professor of sociology, political science, and environmental science at Ohio State, Jenkins became the director of the Mershon Center in July 2011. During his tenure, the Mershon Center endowed a Chair in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution; featured Aaron Friedberg, former deputy assistant for national security affairs and director of policy planning in the Office of the Vice President, as a Kruzel lecture; welcomed Charles F. Hermann, founding director of the George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, as a visiting scholar; and awarded dozens of student study abroad scholarships. Research grants during his tenure supported a wide range of topics including the Comparative National Elections Project, risk and political engagement in South Africa, peace education and training, the struggle for resources during the American Civil War, Bulgaria and the world order, domestic politics and the shaping of American diplomacy, and the Soviet domestic front of the Cultural Cold War, 1957–1970. He was also one of the principal investigators on the Climate, Security, Health and Resilience project.

Jenkins was the author of more than 100 referred articles and book chapters, as well as author or editor of several books including The Politics of Insurgency: The Farm Worker’s Movement of the 1960s (1986); The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements, with Bert Klandermans (1995); Identity Conflicts: Can Violence be Regulated? with Esther Gottlieb (2007); and Democratic Values and Protest Behavior: Harmonization of Data from International Survey Projects, with Kazimierz M. Slomczynski and Irina Tomescu-Dubrow, (2016).

Jenkins received numerous honors, including selection as a Joan Huber Faculty Fellow and as a Fulbright Fellow to Norway, and in 2009 was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He chaired the Department of Sociology at Ohio State from 2006 to 2010 and was a visiting professor at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, Norway, in 2010-11.