Philip Roessler (speaker) is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC and in 2007 will be the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in comparative government at the University of Oxford. His PhD dissertation examines the effects of political authority on conflict initiation and escalation in Africa, with a focus on Sudan, where he conducted field research between March 2005 and April 2006. His article, "Donor-Induced Democratization and Privatization of State-Violence in Kenya and Rwanda," was published in Comparative Politics in January 2005 and his article (co-authored with Marc Morjé Howard), "Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes," appeared in the American Journal of Political Science in April 2006. Roessler is a PhD candidate in the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland and he received his BA in political science from Indiana University.

Macartan Humphreys (respondent) is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting professor at CISAC. He is a research scholar at the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute at Columbia and a member of the Millennium Development goals project poverty task force, where he works on conflict and development issues. Overall his research is on African political economy and formal political theory. His dissertation on the politics of factions developed game theoretic models of conflict and cooperation between internally divided groups. More recent research focuses on rebellions in West Africa, where he has undertaken field research in the Casamance, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Ongoing research now includes experimental work on ethnic politics, econometric work on natural resource conflicts, game theoretic work on ethnic politics and large N survey work of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. Humphreys' work is motivated by concerns over the linkages between politics, conflict and human development. He received his PhD in government from Harvard in 2003 and his MPhil in economics from Oxford in 2000.

Lieutenant Colonel Joseph H. Felter (speaker), a career Special Forces and Foreign Area Officer, is the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and an instructor in the U. S. Military Academy's terrorism studies program. His military experience includes service as a platoon leader with the 75th Ranger Regiment and as a Special Forces operational detachment-alpha and company commander in the 1st Special Forces Group. As a military attaché in Manila, he planned and coordinated combined efforts to develop the counter terrorist capabilities of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Felter is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, earned a master's degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and received his PhD in political science from Stanford University. His dissertation assesses the impact that variation in quality and structures of state internal security forces has on efforts to combat insurgency and terrorism.

David Patel (respondent) is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at both CDDRL (fall quarter) and CISAC (winter and spring quarters). He is completing a dissertation looking at questions of religious organization and collective action in the Middle East, with a theoretical focus on the relationship of organization and information in particular. Empirically, his study looks at Islamic institutions and their role in political action in a wide range of settings including 7th century garrison cities of the early Islamic empire, through the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Patel has spent a great deal of time in the Middle East over the last several years, including extended visits to Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, and Iraq, where he spent seven months in Basra conducting research beginning in the fall of 2003. He works with David Laitin, Jim Fearon, and Avner Greif at Stanford. In fall 2007 he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Colin Kahl is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses in international relations, international security, American foreign policy, civil and ethnic conflict, and terrorism. He will be joining the faculty in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University in the fall of 2007. His current work focuses on U.S. military compliance with the Law of War in Iraq. His research on the topic has been published in Foreign Affairs ("How We Fight," November/December 2006) and International Security ("Rules of Engagement: Norms, Civilian Casualties, and U.S. Conduct in Iraq," forthcoming). His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in March 2006, and related articles have appeared in International Security and the Journal of International Affairs. From January 2005 to August 2006, Kahl was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow conducting research on Law of War issues at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he worked in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations. He has also been a consultant for the U.S. government's Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task Force) since 1999. He received his BA in political science from the University of Michigan in 1993, and his PhD from Columbia University in 2000. In 1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at Harvard University's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. One of his later books, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, history) and Yale University (MA, PhD, American studies).

A major component of the strategy to prevent attacks with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) by transnational terrorist groups requires the widespread utilization of chemical, biological and radiological detection systems. Whether or not one can actually deploy these sensors may well depend on the public perception of the sensor's invasion of their privacy and the court's interpretation of the sensors' challenge to the Constitution's search and seizure protections. However, if scientists and engineers designing new sensors take cognizance of the perspective taken by courts in the past, they will stand a much better chance of providing technical solutions that will balance the Fourth Amendment and civil liberties against the modern realities of terrorist threats. This seminar will discuss and solicit ideas on how legal interpretations of the fourth Amendment can be used to help design modern sensor systems.

Don Prosnitz is currently the deputy drector (programs) for nonproliferation, homeland and international security at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is responsible for overseeing all of the directorate's technical programs. He received his BS from Yale University and his PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then spent two years as an assistant professor in the Engineering and Applied Science Department at Yale before joining Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as an experimental laser physicist. Over the next three decades, he conducted research on lasers, particle accelerators, high-power microwaves, free-electron lasers, and remote sensing, and managed the design, construction, and operation of numerous research facilities. In 1990, he was awarded the U.S. Particle Accelerator Award for Achievement in Accelerator Physics and Technology; in 2002, he was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has served on multiple technical panels, including a Defense Science Board study and various intelligence committees. He is currently a member of the National Academies of Science Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology. In 1996, Prosnitz was briefly detailed to the Department of Energy where he provided technical support to the Office of Nonproliferation and National Security. In 1999, Prosnitz was named the chief science and technology advisor for the Department of Justice (DOJ) by Attorney General Janet Reno. In this newly created position, he was responsible for coordinating technology policy among the DOJ's component agencies and with state and local law enforcement entities on science and technology projects and programs. He served on numerous interagency working groups and federal committees, including the National Science and Technology Council, the Data Management Improvement Act Task Force (immigration systems), and the National Human Research Protections Advisory Committee. He advised the attorney general and DOJ officials and component agencies, such as the FBI, DEA, and former INS (Immigration and Nationalization Service), on such technical matters as weapons of mass destruction, forensics, human subject protection, immunization policy, immigration policy, biometrics, border protection, and information technology. In 2003 he returned to LLNL where he promotes continuing education of the workforce with a special emphasis on the interaction of society and technology.

In this talk James Fearon will be speaking about his forthcoming article, "The Civil War in Iraq," in the March-April 2007 Foreign Affairs.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of political science and CISAC affiliated faculty member at Stanford University. His research has focused on democracy and international disputes, explanations for interstate wars, and, most recently, the causes of civil and especially ethnic violence. He is presently working on a book manuscript (with David Laitin) on civil war since 1945. Representative publications include "Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States" (International Security, Spring 2004), "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" (American Political Science Review, February 2003), and "Rationalist Explanations for War" (International Organization, Summer 1995).

Fearon won the 1999 Karl Deutsch Award, which is "presented annually to a scholar under the age of forty, or within ten years of the acquisition of his or her Doctoral Degree, who is judged to have made, through a body publications, the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research." He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in 2002.

Jennifer Rubenstein received her PhD in political science from the University of Chicago (2005) with a dissertation entitled "Just Samaritans? The politics and ethics of international private aid." In her research, she examines the ways in which humanitarian organizations provide moral justifications for their actions and decisions, and the relationship between these justifications and the conceptual categories through which international aid is understood. Her work, which is informed by extensive primary research, has been funded by grants from SSRC, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Aspen Institute. She specializes in political theory, international politics, democratic theory, and NGOs.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop).