Professor Eli Berman (Economics, UC San Diego) and his research colleagues are at the leading edge of changing how the U.S. military thinks about and addresses political violence, and their research on global terrorism is receiving strong attention in the press, in the October 8 issue of The New Republic and through Berman's new book, Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism.
Late last winter, the Department of Defense signaled it was ready for a change in approach, ready to explore social science and behavioral models for national security challenges, by providing large grants to university researchers through its Minerva Initiative. IGCC researchers won two of the seven multimillion-dollar awards awarded in the competitive process, with the projects "The Evolving Relationship between Technology and National Security in China" and "Terrorism, Governance and Development."
Although Berman’s project, "Terrorism, Governance and Development," is in its first year, it is already drawing national attention. The project's research is featured in an article on the war in Afghanistan in the October 8 issue of The New Republic.
"Terrorism, Governance and Development" is co-directed by Berman and Jacob Shapiro of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The project explores the extent to which terrorism and insurgency are a symptom of poor governance and underdevelopment; it aims to develop an integrated theory of political violence and test it by collecting new data on the use of political violence by religious radicals and other rebels.
In June the project was officially launched with a week-long international workshop on development and conflict for graduate students, held on the UC San Diego campus.
Much of the intellectual underpinning for this research is laid out in Berman's book Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism, which was published in October by the MIT Press. Berman joined the UC San Diego community in 2003 and was appointed Research Director for International Security Studies at IGCC in 2006.
Media contact: Angela Lintz, 858-822-2324
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