Erica Chenoweth (Ph.D., University of Colorado) is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. She also directs Wesleyan’s Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research, which she established in 2008. Chenoweth is an Associate at the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Chenoweth’s research interests include terrorism, the outcomes of nonviolent and violent protest, the consequences of political violence, democratization, and repression.

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Nat Colletta (PhD) is an international expert on conflict, peace building and development. He was founding Manager of the World Bank’s Post Conflict Unit where he played a key role in pioneering and managing the Bank’s policy toward assistance in war to peace transitions. He is currently advising several International Agencies (including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, IFAD, UNDP and UNICEF) and Governments (Indonesia and the Philippines, among others) on conflict prevention and post conflict reconstruction. Among his books are: “War to Peace Transition in Sub-Saharan Africa” (1996); “Violent Conflict and the Transformation of Social Capital: Lessons from Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Somalia” (2000); “Social Cohesion and Conflict Prevention in Asia: Managing Diversity through Development” (2001); and “Privatizing Peace: From Conflict to Security (2002). He was a Visiting Professor of International Relations at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University and is currently teaching at New College, the Honors College of the University of Florida.

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Allan Dafoe is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at UC Berkeley. His current research involves looking at why countries with open capital markets are less likely to go to war, how context influences interstate bargaining, the determinants of resource nationalism, and the effects of temporal controls on substantive findings in quantitative IR. Allan was a researcher and coordinator for a University of California-wide project providing recommendations to the State legislature on state-level export and investment policies. He has also worked as a researcher at various universities on issues of corporate governance, innovation policy, and disease control strategies. He received a BA&Sc at McMaster University and an MA in Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. Email: dafoe@berkeley.edu Website: www.allandafoe.com

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Brent Durbin graduated magna cum laude (English Literature and Politics) from Oberlin College in 1995. After college he helped run a congressional campaign in his hometown district in Washington state. He then completed an MPP at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, focusing on international development and American politics. Subsequent to that he worked as a media consultant and then press secretary for Senator Patty Murray.

Brent is now a Ph.D. candidate in the political science program at Berkeley. His research interests fall at the intersection of American politics and national security policy, and his dissertation addresses political oversight of US and UK intelligence agencies. The specific goal of the project is to understand and explain the peculiar principal-agent relationships that exist among elected officials and intelligence services. He can be reached at durbinb"at"berkeley.edu.

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Dr Scott Field is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Studies and an Adjunct Lecturer in International Relations at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey. From 2005 to 2007 he was a World Peace Fellow at UC Berkeley, during which he specialized in International Security and the Middle East and focused on Iranian and Palestinian politics. In the summer of 2006 he undertook fieldwork in the West Bank and Israel on the entry of Hamas into the political arena. An ecologist by training, his research interests also include the application of models and methods from ecology and evolution to international security issues, and global environmental change and security. He has lived and worked in Israel, traveled widely in the Middle East and studied Arabic to intermediate level.

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Christian Eric Ford is a doctoral student in UC Berkeley's Department of Political Science and a Juris Doctor candidate at the School of Law (Boalt Hall). His main research areas are international law and security.

Christian’s most recent publication, which will be published in the January 2008 issue of Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law (co-authored with Ben A. Oppenheim), analyzes the risks of using U.N. transitional authority to govern post-conflict territories. He is currently working on an article that questions the degree to which globalization has altered trade relations between states and nonstate actors and, in the process, state sovereignty, as some popular figures have recently argued. The article demonstrates how some countries use restrictive immunity to “fake” liberalization while preserving their sovereignty.

Christian has a Master’s in International Relations from Yale University and is a Grand Strategy Program alumnus (http://research.yale.edu/iss/gs_info.html). He has ten years of professional expertise in the areas of international law and international security. He was a member of the U.S. Navy’s Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) Teams for eight years, conducting unconventional military operations in nineteen foreign countries spanning four continents. In 2003, Christian served as special assistant to both the Department of Homeland Security's Director of Infrastructure Protection and Deputy Chief Counsel. During this period, he helped draft federal bioterrorism response plans, as well as federal regulations governing the protection and use of critical infrastructure information. In 2007, Christian worked at the global law firm of Baker & McKenzie, where he focused on international trade and export compliance, transnational corporate restructuring, and the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.
Website: www.christianericford.com

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Nils Gilman is a consultant with the Monitor Group, with a focus on national economic development and security. He has led projects on topics as diverse as the security implications of climate change, the culture of hackers, and the global narcotics trade. Prior to joining the Monitor Group in 2006, Nils spent six years leading competitive strategy and product marketing teams at enterprise software companies such as BEA Systems and Salesforce.com. Nils holds a B.A. and M.A. in European intellectual history and Ph.D. in American history from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins, 2003), a book on the theoretical underpinnings of American policy toward the Third World during the Cold War, as well as numerous articles on intellectual and international history, contemporary politics, and development. He is currently working on a book entitled “Deviant Globalization: The Unpleasant Underside of Transnational Integration.”

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Genevieve Lester is currently a PhD student in political science at UC, Berkeley. Her areas of interest are international relations, security, and foreign policy, with an emphasis on intelligence and decision-making. Prior to her doctoral studies she was a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)—U.S. where she worked on a joint IISS/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory project on the integration of risk analysis and counterterrorism strategic policy. Before her work with IISS, Genevieve was an editor of the British academic journal, International Affairs, based at Chatham House in London and a Fulbright Scholar at the Technical University in Berlin. She holds an MA from the Johns Hopkins University—School of Advanced International Studies and a BA from Carleton College. Genevieve is currently working on domestic intelligence policy and intelligence information-sharing at the RAND Corporation. Genevieve may be reached at glester "at" berkeley.edu.

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Melissa McAdam is a Ph.D. student in the Political Science Department at UC Berkeley. She completed her undergraduate work at both Berkeley and the University of Oxford, Magdalen College, and graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Classics and Political Science from Berkeley in May 2006. Melissa was a Citation Finalist in the Political Science Department and the recipient of the Chair's Award for Distinction in Scholarship in the Classics Department, where she delivered the Commencement Address.

During her senior year, Melissa authored an honors thesis entitled "The Role of Islam in the Russo-Chechen Conflict," which explored the extent to which Islam has and is currently motivating the Chechen independence movement. The project was awarded the Outstanding Honors Thesis Prize. Melissa is interested in exploring the role of Islam in political conflict, rationality in terrorists, terrorist recruitment cycles, and deterrence. She can be reached at mlmcadam"at" berkeley.edu.

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Amy J. Nelson is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies international relations and political theory, investigating the soundness of the philosophical foundations of theories of international relations as well as the robustness of the causal explanations within them. Prior to her studies at Berkeley, Amy worked as a neuroscientist, researching both human decision-making and visual perception. She received an AB in Philosophy from Stanford University and an MA in Intellectual History from Columbia University.

At the Institute of International Studies, Amy's research draws on these fields of study to address issues in biotechnology and life science policy. Specifically, Amy is examining current US biodefense policy, including the risks associated with biological threats, as well as the use of intelligence in crafting both domestic biotechnology policy and international security strategy. Her most recent work evaluates the ways in which conceptualizations of the tradeoffs associated with the research and development of biotechnology vary by community, discipline, or sector. Email: ajnelson "at" berkeley.edu.

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Jay speaks both French and German. He was formerly Assistant Director of the Program on International Security at the Atlantic Council of the United States (August 2001-August 2005); Senior Editor/Proposal Coordinator at Stanley Associates, Inc. (August 2005-July 2006); and French Instructor at The American School in Switzerland (June 2001-August 2001). He earned a BSFS in International Law, Institutions, and Ethics at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service; a Certificate in European Political Studies from the Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) in Strasbourg, France; and an MA in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. E-Mail: jasonpurcell@berkeley.edu

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Regine Spector is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department at UC Berkeley, where her dissertation examines political economy and property rights in Central Asia. At the Institute for International Studies (IIS), Regine is a research fellow working on two projects, one that investigates the global rise in resource nationalism and the other that explores responses by incumbents around the world to the recent electoral revolutions in Europe and Eurasia. She is also helping to organize the third annual IIS-sponsored New Era Foreign Policy Conference in 2008, which brings together leading graduate students and foreign policy scholars to invigorate the foreign policy community with fresh new ideas and avenues for future research.

Regine graduated from Stanford University with a BA in International Relations and an MA in International Policy Studies. She worked as a research assistant for two years at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., exploring ethnic conflict, energy politics, and political development in Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. While at Brookings, she co-authored an article in the Washington Quarterly entitled: “Central Asia: More Than Islamic Extremists” (2002). In pursuing her research, Regine has lived in Russia, Germany, Georgia, and numerous Central Asian countries.

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Michael Zielenziger is the author of Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation published in September, 2006, by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday books. He is a research scholar at the Institute of International Studies, University of California - Berkeley where he works on issues related to US-China relations, and the impacts of globalization on competitiveness and innovation. For more than seven years, until May 2003, he was the Tokyo-based bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers, publishers of The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Jose Mercury News, and more than thirty other American newspapers. He has written extensively about social, economic and political trends in Japan, China, South Korea, India and Southeast Asia. He is a recipient of the Abe Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council of New York City and has also been affiliated with UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies.

As a Tokyo-based foreign correspondent, Zielenziger traveled extensively throughout Asia, covering two Philippine revolutions, the IMF crisis in South Korea, the removal of Suharto and the election of Gus Dur in Indonesia, and the efforts of tiny Bhutan to wrestle with the impacts of globalization. After September 11, 2001, Zielenziger also spent long periods in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Israel, covering the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Before moving to Tokyo, Zielenziger served as the first Pacific Rim correspondent for The San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper of Silicon Valley, where he helped described the burgeoning connections between Asia and the U.S. West Coast. He was a finalist for a 1995 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for a series describing the efforts of Overseas Chinese to propel the modernization of China. He also wrote extensively about the emergence of the software industry in India, and its potential to create collaborative and competitive relationships with U.S. software developers. He was also a contributor to two other Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the Mercury News; one described the "hidden wealth" accumulated by then Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.

Zielenziger was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University in 1991, where he studied in the Asia-Pacific Research Center and Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Previously, he opened Knight Ridder's first Seattle bureau and worked for The Chicago Sun-Times and The Kansas City Star. He is a graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. He speaks Japanese, French and Hebrew.

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Naazneen Barma is a Public Sector Specialist in the East Asia and Pacific Region at the World Bank, which she entered through the Young Professionals Program. She works operationally and conducts research on institution-building and governance reform in several countries in East Asia, with a focus on fragile and post-conflict states.

Naazneen received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in Fall 2007. Her dissertation is a study of the international role in post-conflict peacebuilding, through a comparative assessment of the United Nations-led transitional governance exercises in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and East Timor. She was designated a Peace Scholar by the United States Institute of Peace in 2005-06 and has held other dissertation fellowships from the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies. At the New Era Foreign Policy Project, she co-led the International Dynamics of Emerging Powers research program, was a founding organizer of the New Era Foreign Policy Conference, and co-designed and facilitated the New Era Global Scenario Project.

Naazneen has published articles on globalization under American unipolarity, innovation in emerging economies, the economic and political rise of China, international relations among non-Western nations, and United Nations-led democracy-building efforts in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and East Timor. Her commentary has appeared in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, and The San Francisco Chronicle. She is the co-editor of The Political Economy Reader: Markets as Institutions. Naazneen grew up in Hong Kong and received both her BA and MA from Stanford University.
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Matthew Kroenig is a post-doctoral fellow in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and an assistant professor in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University (effective fall 2008). He holds a Ph.D. (2007) and M.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Kroenig’s research explains the strategic incentives that drive nuclear-capable states to provide sensitive nuclear assistance to nonnuclear-weapon states. His other research focuses on international security, nuclear proliferation, soft power, terrorism, and civil war. His writings on international security issues have appeared in such publications as Democratization, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Newsday, and Security Studies. He has held academic fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California.

Dr. Kroenig has also served as a strategist on the policy planning staff in the Office of the Secretary of Defense where he was a principal author of key national security strategy and defense review documents and where he directed the development of a U.S. government-wide strategy for deterring terrorist networks. For his work, he received the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Award for Outstanding Achievement.