Martha Crenshaw (speaker) is a senior fellow at CISAC and FSI and a professor of political science by courtesy. She was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., from 1974 to 2007. Her current research focuses on innovation in terrorist campaigns, the distinction between "old" and "new" terrorism, how terrorism ends, and why the United States is the target of terrorism. She serves on the Executive Board of Women in International Security and chairs the American Political Science Association (APSA) Task Force on Political Violence and Terrorism. She has served on the Council of the APSA and is a former President and Councilor of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP). In 2004 ISPP awarded her its Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution and in 2005 the Jeanne Knutson award for service to the society. She serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Security, Orbis, Political Psychology, Security Studies, and Terrorism and Political Violence. She coordinated the working group on political explanations of terrorism for the 2005 Club de Madrid International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security. She is a lead investigator with the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism (NC-START) at the University of Maryland, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005-2006. She serves on the Committee on Law and Justice and the Committee on Determining Basic Research Needs to Interrupt the Improvised Explosive Device Delivery Chain of the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science. She was a senior fellow at the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City for 2006-2007.

David Laitin (discussant) is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a CISAC faculty member. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, and Estonia. His latest book is Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. He is currently working on a project in collaboration with James Fearon on civil wars in the past half-century. From that project, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" has appeared in the American Political Science Review. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

The speaker, Macartan Humphreys, 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.

The respondent, David Patel, is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at 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.

Uday Mehta is the Clarence Francis Professor in the Social Sciences at Amherst College. A political theorist, he has taught at Amherst since 2000, has a BA from Swarthmore College, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. He received a fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2002. On this fellowship, he conducted case studies of minorities in India, South Africa, and Israel as they struggle for political and social recognition. His publications include The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in Locke's Political Thought, published in 1992, and Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought, published in 1999.

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