Susie Linfield is author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press). She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism. Her articles and essays on politics and culture have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Washington Post Book World, the New York Times, Dissent, the Nation, Guernica, Bookforum, Salmagundi, and the Boston Review. For six years she was a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and she was formerly an editor at American Film, the Village Voice, and the Washington Post.

Richard Goldstone served on South Africa's Transvaal Supreme Court from 1980 to 1989 and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court from 1990 to 1994. During the transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy, Goldstone headed the Goldstone Commission investigations into political violence in South Africa. He was credited with playing an indispensable role in the transition and became a household name in South Africa, attracting widespread international support and interest. Goldstone's work investigating violence led to him being nominated to serve as the first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. On his return to South Africa he took up a seat on the newly-established Constitutional Court of South Africa. In 2009, Goldstone led an independent fact-finding mission created by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the Gaza War.

James Campbell's research focuses on African American history and the wider history of the black Atlantic. He is particularly interested in the long history of interconnections and exchange between Africa and America, a history that began in the earliest days of the transatlantic slave trade and continues into our own time.  In recent years, his research has moved in the direction of so-called “public history," the ways in which societies tell stories about their pasts, not only in textbooks and academic monographs but also in historic sites, museums, memorials, movies, and political movements.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is cofounder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government, a member of the Policy Advisory Board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and served as a senior consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics. His scholarship focuses on the interplay of law, ethics, and politics in modern society. His current research is concerned with the material and moral preconditions of liberal democracy in America and abroad.

Abstract
If an armed group cannot be defeated in war, are there conditions in peace that will allow for its demobilization and disbandment?  What are the key barriers that stand in the way?  Using case studies of the three large paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland since the 1994 ceasefires, I weigh competing arguments from the civil conflict literature about the security concerns of previously warring parties that stand in the way of security normalization.  I find that existing theories miss two crucial forms of post-conflict security crises: intra-community criminality and inter-communal confrontations.  These two kinds of security concerns present two major challenges to the normalization of security that are instructive to broader theory on conflict termination and peace-building.  First, these security concerns are not the kind that outside actors can successfully manage without the partnership of local power brokers.  As a result, state actors institutionalize paramilitary authority rather than replacing it.  Second, the management of these security concerns does not present clear-cut opportunities for signaling the commitment to peace necessary for trust-building amongst formerly warring parties.  Armed groups are forced to make impossible choices that signal weak commitments and make a return to war more likely.

Brenna Marea Powell is a 6th year PhD candidate in the department of Government at Harvard University, and a doctoral fellow at the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. She received her AB from Stanford in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research interests include inequality, civil conflict and political violence in divided societies. Her three-article dissertation research explores the role of political institutions in redefining ethno-racial boundaries and social hierarchy. This includes work on post-conflict policing in Northern Ireland, racial policy in Brazil, and the politics of ethno-racial classification in the United States.

Eric Morris is a Visiting Scholar at CISAC and is Practitioner-in-Residence at the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies. Most recently he served as the UN Recovery Coordinator for Aceh and Nias following the Indian Ocean tsunami of December, 2004. He headed the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from 2002 to 2005. In 2000-01 he served simultaneously as Special Envoy in the Balkans of the High Commissioner for Refugees and as UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Kosovo. In 1998-99 he was Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General for the UN Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on police and judicial reform issues. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University, an MA from Yale University, and a BA from Baylor University.