Devon Curtis is a Hamburg Fellow at CISAC and a doctoral candidate in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Before starting her Ph.D., Devon worked as a researcher in the Privy Council Office of the Government of Canada, and at the United Nations Staff College. She has worked for the UN in the African Great Lakes region, and has also served as a consultant to a number of non-governmental organizations, including the Overseas Development Institute. Devon holds an MA and a BA in Political Science and Economics from McGill University.

Devon will discuss her dissertation research, which asks why external actors promote power-sharing as a response to internal conflict, despite power-sharing's relatively poor record in bringing about self-sustaining peace. Her work focuses on the peace process in Burundi.

Readings attached. Limited copies available at Alice Chen's cubical, Encina Hall (C206-7).

Tea & Cookies will be served at 3:15.

Albert J. Bergesen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, and this year visiting professor of sociology at Stanford, where he offered "The Sociology of Terrorism" during the Winter quarter, and will offer, "Sayyid Qutb: The Father of Islamic Fundamentalism", this summer as a Stanford CSP course. His research centers upon Islamic fundamentalism/sociology of religion and the quantitative study of political violence. At present he is assembling a Terrorist Events File comprised of contemporary transnational terrorist events since 1968 and the 1878-1914 period of anarchist terrorist events. This data, and the resultant theoretical structures and models derived from it's analysis, will be used to construct a natural history of Cycles of Terrorism, which will have implications for trying to make predictions about present trends in type of attack, the geographical locale of attack, and the social/political characteristics of targets and victims.

Dr. Nasr's talk will focus on the implications of change of the balance of power between Shi'as and Sunnis for regional politics in Iraq and for the emerging trends in Sunni militancy in the region.

Vali Nasr is a specialist on contemporary Islam and its relations to politics in the Muslim world. His recent work is focused on emerging patterns in Islamism, in particular with regard to Shi'i-Sunni sectarianism. He is the author of The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Oxford University Press, 2001); Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford University Press, 1996); an editor of Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2003). His works on political Islam and comparative politics of South Asia and the Middle East has been published in a number of journals including, the New York Times, Comparative Politics, Asian Survey, Daedalus, Middle East Journal, and International Journal of Middle East Studies, as well as in numerous edited volumes on the Middle East, South Asia, political Islam and comparative politics. His work has been translated into Arabic, Indonesian, Chinese, and Urdu. Dr. Nasr has been the recipient of fellowship grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

Dr. Nasr earned his degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1991), the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (MALD, 1984), and Tufts University (BA, 1983).

How do states know what lies in their national interest? Hironaka explores this issue through examination of colonial expansion, and other domains of state security and power. Given the critical role of interests in many social theories, surprisingly little research has been done on the question. Scholars routinely avoid the issue by inferring interests from observed action in a post-hoc and often tautological manner. Instead, Hironaka draws on organizational sociology as a starting point: Large organizational actors like states often experience great ambiguity regarding their interests. States function in a complex political and social world in which both state interests and the means of achieving those interests are often unclear. Hironaka proposes that states respond to this ambiguity by attending to and participating in discourses in the international community. Collective interaction revolving around interpretation of the "Great Powers" and significant international events (such as the outcome of major wars) provide the grist for an evolving international consensus regarding appropriate state strategies and behavior. When faced with ambiguity, states draw upon the international consensus to inform their interests. Consequently, the international community plays a critical role in shaping state policies -- and thus the conflicts that are likely to arise in the international system. Ann Hironaka is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.