Engineers of Jihad: The Interpretation

Diego Gambetta is a sociologist at Nuffield College, Oxford, working on theories of trust and signals. He is known for his book The Sicilian Mafia and his edited volume, Making Sense of Suicide Missions. While at Stanford, he will discuss his recent manuscript, "Engineers of Jihad" as well as his recently published book, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate.

Diego Gambetta will be visiting Stanford from late March to late April, 2010.

Abstract
Among violent Islamists individuals with an engineering education are four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries.  We argue that a combination of two factors – engineers’ relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset – is the most plausible explanation. In this second talk I will focus on the mindset.

This talk is the final of a two part series presented by Dr. Gambetta. His first talk, "Engineers of Jihad: The Facts," will be presented at noon on Friday, April 2, at the Stanford Humanities Center.