His first positions were as lecturer in Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and as an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Manitoba. After receiving his Ph.D in 1984, he worked at McGill University as an Assistant and then Associate Professor of Political Science from 1984 to 1991. He then served as a Professor of Political Science at Florida State University from 1991 to 1994. From 1994 until 1998, he was chair of the Political Science Department at Iowa State University, then as Professor of Political Science there from 1999 to 2001. He then went to the University of Missouri as Professor of Political Science from 2001 until 2004, becoming the Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of Political Science from 2004 to 2005. Since 2005, he has been Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, as well as the Director of the Center for International Studies. He has taught in several other fields over the course of his professional life. These fields include International Relations, Comparative Politics, Rational Choice, and Empirical Methods. He specialized in fields such as conflict, crisis and war, Canadian politics, collective action, expected utility and game theory, and research design and statistics.
Canadian Representative, Annual Conference on International Peace, Institute of International Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea, June, 1991.
Commentator on World Politics, CBC Radio, September 1985.
Consultant, U.S. Department of State, Institute for Political Training, 1980-83.
Publications
James has 333 citations of his published works from 1985 to 2003, including books, symposia, articles, chapters in books, reviews, miscellaneous entries, manuscripts, and conference papers and presentations.
Who Intervenes? Ethnic Conflict and Interstate Crisis..
A New Quest for International Peace: Civil-Military Dynamics, Political Communications and Democracy..
International Relations and Scientific Progress: Structural Realism Reconsidered.
The Myth of the Sacred: The Charter, the Courts and the Politics of the Constitution in Canada.
Evolutionary Theory and Ethnic Conflict. In over 450 libraries according to WorldCat
Peace in the Midst of Wars: Preventing and Managing International Ethnic Conflicts.
Wars in the Midst of Peace: The International Politics of Ethnic Conflict.
Politics and Rationality.
Crisis and War. In over 400 libraries according to WorldCat
Crisis and Change in World Politics.
Articles and book chapters
He has published over 75 articles in peer-reviewed journals a number of book chapters, and a great many book reviews, conference presentations, lectures, and other items.