David Patel (speaker) is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at CDDRL (fall quarter) and postdoctoral fellow at CISAC (winter and spring quarters). His dissertation examines 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.

Patel received his PhD in political science from Stanford University in March 2007. In fall 2007 he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Walter W. Powell (respondent) is a professor of education and affiliated professor of organizational behavior, sociology, and communications at Stanford University. He is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. At Stanford, he is director of the Scandinavian Consortium on Organizational Research. Powell works in the areas of organization theory and economic sociology. He is coauthor of Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (1983), an analysis of the transformation of book publishing from a family-run, craft-based field into a multinational media industry, and author of Getting Into Print (1985), an ethnographic study of decision-making processes in scholarly publishing houses. He edited The Nonprofit Sector (1987, referred to by reviewers as "the Bible of scholarship on the nonprofit sector"). Powell is currently directing a large scale study, Stanford Project on the Evolution of the Nonprofit Sector, of the circulation of managerial practices in the Bay Area nonprofit community, mapping the flow of ideas among consultants, philanthropists, founders, business leaders, government officials, and nonprofit managers. Powell is widely known for his contributions to institutional analysis, beginning with his article, with Paul DiMaggio, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields" (1983) and their subsequent edited book, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (1991). At Stanford, he is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Social Innovation at the Graduate School of Business, a member of the Public Policy faculty, and serves on the governing board of the France-Stanford program.

Pavel Podvig (speaker) joined CISAC as a research associate in 2004. Before that he was a researcher at the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). He worked as a visiting researcher with the Security Studies Program at MIT and with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, and he taught physics in MIPT's General Physics Department for more than ten years.

Podvig graduated with honors from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1988, with a degree in physics. In 2004 he received a PhD in political science from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

His research has focused on technical and political issues of missile defense, space security, U.S.-Russian relations, structure and capabilities of the Russian strategic forces, and nuclear nonproliferation. He was the head of the Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces research project and the editor of a book of the same title, which is considered a definitive source of information on Russian strategic forces.

Theodore Postol (discussant) is a professor of science, technology and national security policy in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. He did his undergraduate work in physics and his graduate work in nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After receiving his Ph.D., Postol joined the staff of Argonne National Laboratory, where he studied the microscopic dynamics and structure of liquids and disordered solids using neutron, x-ray and light scattering, along with computer molecular dynamics techniques. Subsequently he went to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment to study methods of basing the MX Missile, and later worked as a scientific adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. After leaving the Pentagon, Postol helped to build a program at Stanford University to train mid-career scientists to study developments in weapons technology of relevance to defense and arms control policy. In 1990 Postol was awarded the Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society. In 1995 he received the Hilliard Roderick Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 2001 he received the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility for uncovering numerous and important false claims about missile defenses.

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.

Co-Sponsored by The Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law;

the Stanford Project on Human Rights Diplomacy, the Project on Peace and Cooperation in the Asian-Pacific Region, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation

Dr. Dan Wei will give an overview of the present state of legal reform in China, and will cover such topics as the death penalty and other criminal procedure reforms, and measures to insure the rights of detainees and prisoners.

He is a professor at the Institute for Procuratorial Theory of the Supreme People's Procuratorate of China, one of the four principal branches of the Chinese judicial system. He was a Fellow of the Danish Institute of Human Rights in 2002, and he travels and speaks widely in China and overseas on topics related to the development of Chinese law and practice.

Since receiving a PhD from Wuhan University in 1999, he has published 5 books and more than 40 articles in the field of criminal justice. His book, Comparative Studies on the Crimes of Trafficking in Persons, published by The Law Press of China in June 2004, is the first specialized Chinese publication on the topic of human trafficking.

As the deputy editor in chief of Chinese Criminal Science, he has transformed the journal into the most authoritative publication in the field of criminology in China. The journal now boasts more than 20,000 readers. The State Council granted him a Special Award for Distinguished Service in 2004.

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.