David Pion-Berlin

David Pion-Berlin is an American political scientist, academic, author and scholar. He is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. He is a Latin Americanist widely known for his research and writings on political repression, civil-military relations, defense, and security.

Pion-Berlin's work is focused on the area of Latin American politics, civil-military relations, security and defense, political violence, and human rights. In the area of International Relations, his work has dealt with the topics of regional security and international influences on Latin America. He has written over 100 articles, reviews, and books, including Soldiers, Politicians, and Civilians: Reforming Civil-Military Relations in Latin America (2017), which earned two best book awards in 2019, and Military Missions in Democratic Latin America (2016).

Pion-Berlin is the recipient of the 2019 Alfred Stepan Lifetime Achievement Award in Defense, Public Security and Democracy by the Latin American Studies Association, for his contributions to the study of civil-military relations. In recognition for his pedagogical work, he received the University of California, Riverside Dissertation Mentoring Award in 2016. He is a Fulbright Scholar and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, The American Philosophical Society, and the Ford Foundation.

Pion-Berlin received a B.A. from Colgate University in 1974 followed by an M.A. from University of Denver in 1981. He then received his Ph.D. at the Graduate School of International Studies, the University of Denver in 1984.

In 1985, Pion-Berlin joined Ohio State University as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. In 1991, he left The Ohio State University and joined the University of California at Riverside as an associate professor, becoming full professor in 1997. In 2021 he became a distinguished professor.

He is an associate editor of Armed Forces & Society.

At the beginning of his career, Pion-Berlin's research dealt with the question: why do governments resort to the most severe forms of intimidation and punishment of political opponents when other forms of political control may suffice? Departing from convention that state violence is usually a proportional, tit for tat response to societal violence, he focused on the doctrines and perceptions that guided the military's disproportionate and excessive attacks on its opponents. Threat perceptions, he discovered, were not grounded in objective appraisals of the opposition but rather in skewed preconceptions that derived from security doctrines popular among military regimes during the Cold War era.

Following that, Pion-Berlin's research turned to the theme of civil-military relations. As a Fulbright scholar, he conducted numerous and extensive field trips to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, including interviews with leading political and military figures. Based on his findings, he developed new analytical approaches to the study of how governments and their militaries interact. He found that, in order to know whether politicians or soldiers will prevail when they conflict over policy, one needs to know the characteristics of the agencies that have policy jurisdiction, and whether they create more formidable obstacles for one side than the other. Thus, a key and original finding of his book Through Corridors of Power: Institutions and Civil-Military Relations in Argentina, was that as the design of state institutions differed, so too did the civil-military balance of power.