Ron E. Hassner (speaker) is an assistant professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley. He returns to CISAC as a visiting professor, having served as predoctoral fellow from 2000 to 2003. His research revolves around symbolic and emotive aspects of international security with particular attention to religious violence, Middle Eastern politics and territorial disputes. His publications have focused on the role of perceptions in entrenching international disputes, the causes and characteristics of conflicts over sacred places, the characteristics of political-religious leadership and political-religious mobilization and the role of national symbols in conflict.

Hassner was a fellow of the MacArthur Consortium on Peace and Security in 2000-2003. In 2003-2004 he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Olin Institute for International Security, Harvard University. He is a graduate of Stanford University with degrees in political science and religious studies.

Jacob Shapiro (discussant) is a CISAC postdoctoral fellow. His primary research interest is the organization of terrorism and insurgency. His other research interests include international relations, organization theory, and security policy. Shapiro's ongoing projects study the balance between secrecy and openness in counterterrorism, the impact of international human rights law on democracies' foreign policy, the causes of militant recruitment in Islamic countries, and the relationship between public goods provision and insurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. His research has been published in International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Foreign Policy, and a number of edited volumes. Shapiro is a Harmony Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy. As a Naval Reserve officer he was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Naval Warfare Development Command. He served on active duty at Special Boat Team 20 and onboard the USS Arthur W. Radford (DD-968). He holds a PhD in political science and an MA in economics from Stanford University and a BA in political science from the University of Michigan.

Jessica Weeks is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, the 2007-2008 Zukerman Fellow and a pre-doctoral fellow at CISAC, and the Teaching Assistant for the CISAC Honors Program. Her dissertation, "Leaders, Accountability, and Foreign Policy in Non-Democracies" studies how different levels of domestic accountability affect leaders' decisions about international conflict. Additional research investigates the effectiveness of military interventions, and the escalation and resolution of international military crises.

Jessica graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Political Science from The Ohio State University in 2001, and received an MA in International History and Politics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

Scott Sagan (speaker) is a professor of political science and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as a special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. He has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989), The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993), and with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (W.W. Norton, 2002). He is the co-editor of Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James L. Wirtz, Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000). Sagan was the recipient of Stanford University's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and the 1998 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. As part of CISAC's mission of training the next generation of security specialists he and Stephen Stedman founded Stanford's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies in 2000. His recent articles include "How to Keep the Bomb From Iran," in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2006); "The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969" co-written by Jeremi Suri and published in International Security in spring 2003; and "The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Will More Nuclear Security Forces Produce More Nuclear Security?" published in Risk Analysis in 2004. In addition to these works, Sagan is also finishing a collection of essays for a book tentatively entitled Inside Nuclear South Asia.

Paul Kapur (discussant) is a visiting professor at CISAC, on leave from the U.S. Naval War College, where he is an associate professor in the Department of Strategic Research. Before joining the War College in 2006, Kapur was visiting professor at CISAC and assistant professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. He also served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in political science. His research interests include the strategic effects of nuclear weapons proliferation, deterrence theory, and the international security environment in South Asia. Kapur is author of Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2007). His work has also appeared in journals such as International Security, Security Studies, Asian Survey, and Asian Security.

Brent Durbin (speaker) is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. He is also a 2007-2008 dissertation fellow at the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation. In his dissertation, Durbin explains the political and policy dynamics of U.S. intelligence adaptation. His broader research interests fall at the intersection of organization theory, decision-making, and national security policy. Durbin has served as a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge (UK) and The George Washington University, and as a senior staff member for U.S. Senator Patty Murray. He holds degrees from Oberlin College, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Paul Stockton (discussant) is a senior research scholar at CISAC. He was formerly the associate provost at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and was the former director of its Center for Homeland Defense and Security. His teaching and research focuses on how U.S. security institutions respond to changes in the threat (including the rise of terrorism), and the interaction of Congress and the Executive branch in restructuring national security budgets, policies and institutional arrangements. Stockton joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in August 1990. From 1995 until 2000, he served as director of NPS's Center for Civil-Military Relations. From 2000-2001, he founded and served as the acting dean of NPS's School of International Graduate Studies. He was appointed associate provost in 2001.

Insurgents in Iraq have turned mosques into fortified strongholds, forcing U.S. troops to weigh the costs of desecrating sacred space against the risk of operational failure. U.S. decision-makers are woefully ill-equipped to engage with the religious implications of the war in Iraq. Learn how a nuanced understanding of Islam in its multiple traditions might change the terms of engagement in the conflict in Iraq and elsewhere.

This talk will focus on Ian J. Bickerton's new book entitled Unintended Consequences: The United States at War, co-authored by Kenneth J. Hagan.

Ian J. Bickerton (speaker) is a visiting research fellow and former associate professor of history at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He has researched and published extensively on United States foreign relations, paying particular attention to China, Israel, and the Middle East. He has also focused much of his work on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Gulf War. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including A Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2007). He received his BA from Adelaide University, his MA from Kansas State University, and his PhD from Claremont Graduate School.

Kenneth Schultz (respondent) is an associate professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. His research examines how domestic political factors such as elections, party competition, and public opinion influence decisions to use force in international disputes and efforts to negotiate the end of international rivalries. He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2001), as well as a number of articles in scholarly journals. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2003 Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association to a scholar under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research. Schultz received his BA in Russian and Soviet studies from Harvard University and his PhD in political science from Stanford University.