Dr. Benjamin V. Allison

Dr. Benjamin V. Allison is a Nonresident Fellow at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, a Research Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security, and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. He also serves as a Book Review Editor for H-Diplo.

An international historian of the Cold War and the Middle East, Ben's book project, The Camp David Moment: Cold Wars in the Middle East, examines relations between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the Arab world in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Drawing on sources in Arabic, Bulgarian, Russian, and English, he shows how the struggle over the Egyptian-Israeli peace process reconfigured the Middle East and precipitated the Second Cold War (1979–86). He also demonstrates how those same dynamics, paradoxically, led to the early exit of the Global Cold War from the Middle East by the early 1980s.

Ben's scholarly work includes articles on Jimmy Carter's Middle East policy in Cold War History; why terrorists don't attack American bridges and tunnels for the International Centre for Counter-terrorism; and the ethics and politics of terrorism data for Perspectives on Terrorism. His public-facing writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, TIME, Lawfare, The Hill, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.

Ben received his BA in History from Grove City College (2018), his MA in History from Kent State University (2020), and his PhD in History from the University of Texas at Austin (2026).