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.

Alisa Carrigan (speaker) is a PhD candidate in the War Studies Department at King's College, London and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. For the past three years, she has been researching nuclear non-proliferation policy, with special focus on the training and movement of nuclear human capital under the current non-proliferation regime. At CISAC, Carrigan is working on a project entitled "Strengthening the WMD Non-Proliferation Regime." Carrigan earned her master's degree in international security from the University of St. Andrews (UK), and her BA in government and psychology from Claremont McKenna College. As an undergraduate, she interned at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Alex Montgomery (respondent) was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is now an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. nonproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.

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).

Over five years since 9/11, the United States is still struggling to define the nature of the terrorist challenge it faces let alone fully comprehend it. As a consequence, the United States and its partners in the "global war on terror" still lack a comprehensive strategy for responding to the challenge. Drawing on a growing area of social science research relating to "social contagion" phenomena, the challenge posed by "Islamist militancy" will be assessed using the principles and practices of epidemiology. A new more promising strategy emerges as a consequence.

Paul B. Stares is vice president of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and director of its Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention. He currently focuses on northeast Asian security issues, U.S. post-conflict stability operations, and counterterrorism policy. He has authored or edited nine books in addition to numerous book chapters, articles, and op-eds in leading U.S. and European newspapers. In 2006, Stares led the Iraq Study Groups Strategic Environment Expert Working Group.

Prior to joining USIP in 2002, Stares was associate director and senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. From 1996 to 2000 he worked in Japan, first as a senior research fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs and then as director of studies at the Japan Center for International Exchange. At various times, Stares has been a senior fellow and research associate in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution as well as a NATO fellow, a scholar-in-residence at the MacArthur Foundation Moscow Office, a Rockefeller International Relations Fellow, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

He has also held academic posts at the University of Sussex and the University of Lancaster in Great Britain, where he received his PhD.