Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Costs of War

Contributors

Steven Aftergood

Steven Aftergood

Senior Research Analyst at the Federation of American Scientists

Steven Aftergood directs the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, which works to reduce the scope of national security secrecy and to promote public access to declassified government information. He writes Secrecy News, which reports on new developments in secrecy policy and provides direct access to significant official records that are otherwise hard to find. Mr. Aftergood has been the plaintiff in Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office which resulted in the release of intelligence budget records.

Nadje Al-Ali

Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University, Director of Middle East Studies undergraduate concentration at Brown University

Nadje Al-Ali’s publications include We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War (edited with Deborah Al-Najjar, 2013); What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (co-authored with Nicola Pratt, 2009); and Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007), among others. She is a founding member of Act Together: Women's Action for Iraq. Al-Ali has helped to coordinate the first Iraqi shadow report of CEDAW. 

Areas of Interest: Women, gender, Iraq

Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí

Departmental Lecturer, University of Oxford

Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí is Departmental Lecturer in Political Philosophy and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Prior to that, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She obtained her Ph.D. in Political Science (political philosophy) from Boston University. Before entering academia, she worked at Chatham House, and then at the Guardian Newspaper where she was based in the press lobby of the UK House of Commons. 
Her research is focused in African and Contemporary political, moral, and legal philosophy, where she studies questions of democracy and democratic practice in African countries and beyond. Her research has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, Philosophical Forum, and the Routledge Handbook of African Political Philosophy. Her other works have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker Radio Hour, the Guardian (UK), the Conversation, the Republic Journal, Ilora Magazine, and Premium Times Newspaper. She is working on her first book, Law's Moral Legitimacy (with Bloomsbury Publishing).

Areas of Interest: African and Contemporary political, moral, and legal philosophy; democracy.

Andrew J. Bacevich

President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; Professor Emeritus of History and International Relations, Boston University

A graduate of the US Military Academy, Andrew Bacevich received his Ph.D. in American diplomatic history from Princeton. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed (2021).

Areas of Interest: Military industrial complex, social and political costs of war

Hira Bashir

Director of Data Analytics, Pakistan Body Count

Hira Bashir leads data analytics at Pakistan Body Count. Along with Zeeshan Usmani, he has co-authored the book, Drones and Pakistan (forthcoming).

Karen Bell

Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Urban Development

Karen Bell researches and teaches Just Transition, environmental justice and environmental policy at the University of Glasgow. She is author of numerous publications, including the monographs ‘Achieving Environmental Justice’ (2014) and ‘Working Class Environmentalism’ (2021). She PhD in Environmental Justice from the University of Bristol and a Masters in Peace Studies from the University of Bradford.

Areas of Interest: Environmental Justice, Sustainability, Urban Development, Environmental Policy, Peace

Chantal Berman

Assistant Professor at the Department of Government at Georgetown University

Berman is a political scientist who researches the contemporary politics of the Middle East & North Africa. She writes about protest and mobilization, political economy and development, and political violence.

Catherine Besteman

Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology, Colby College

A past President of the Association of Political and Legal Anthropologists and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, Catherine Besteman's books include Militarized Global Apartheid (2020), Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (2016), Transforming Cape Town (2008), Unraveling Somalia (1999), and the co-edited volumes Cultures of Militarism (2019), Life by Algorithms (2019), The Insecure American (2009) and Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong (2005).

Areas of Interest: Inequality and racism; security, insecurity, violence, and militarism; Somalia; migration and mobility

Linda J. Bilmes

Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Professor Linda J. Bilmes is a leading expert on budgeting and public finance. She represents the United States on the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration. She served as Assistant Secretary and Chief Financial Officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce from 1998 to 2001 and on the U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service Advisory Board and the US Department of Labor Veterans Employment and Opportunity Board from 2011 to 2017. Dr Bilmes has authored numerous books, book chapters and papers including the New York Times bestseller The Three Trillion Dollar War (with Joseph E. Stiglitz), The People Factor (with W. Scott Gould), and Valuing the US National Parks and Programs: America’s Best Investment (with John Loomis). Her research focuses on how budgetary resources are allocated, particularly with respect to the value of public lands, state and local governments, costs of war, veterans and the military. She has served on numerous commissions examining the National Park Service, including the bipartisan “Second Century Commission”. She has received many awards and honors, including the 2008 “Speaking Truth to Power” Award by the American Friends Service Committee. Her researched has been published in The New York Times, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Boston Globe, Barron’s and Foreign Policy and numerous academic journals. Dr. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she teaches courses on budgeting and financial management and on restorative justice. She is Faculty Chair of the Greater Boston Advanced Applied Field Lab and the Bloomberg Cities Field Lab, an experiential learning program in which students work directly on complex challenges in cities across the country. She also teaches at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. She is co-chair of Economists for Peace and Security and serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. She holds an AB and MBA from Harvard University and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.

Areas of Interest: Veterans’ health care, costs of war

Melani Cammett

Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs, Department of Government, Harvard University

Melani Cammett is Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Government and Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She also holds a secondary faculty appointment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research explores “toleration” after ethnoreligious conflict, the politics of social service delivery, and the historical roots of economic and social development, primarily in the Middle East. Cammett has published numerous books and articles in academic and policy journals.

Areas of Interest: Comparative politics, Middle Eastern and North African politics

Rosella Cappella Zielinski

Assistant Professor of Political Science, Boston University

Rosella Cappella Zielinski is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University and non-resident fellow at the Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity at Marine Corps University who specializes in the political economy of security. She is the author of How States Pay for Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016) winner of the 2017 American Political Science Association Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award in International History and Politics. Her other works can be found in the Journal of Peace Research, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Security Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Global Security Studies, as well as Foreign Affairs, Texas National Security Review, and War on the Rocks.

Areas of Interest: War Finance, Military Spending

Noah Coburn

Political Anthropologist, Bennington College

Noah Coburn has conducted research in Afghanistan since 2005 with the United States Institute of Peace, the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, the Aga Khan Trust for culture and other organizations. He is author of Bazaar Politics: Power and Pottery in an Afghan Bazaar (2011) and Losing Afghanistan (2016), and with Anna Larson, Derailing Democracy in Afghanistan (2014). He has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Boston University.

Areas of Interest: Violence, local governance, Afghanistan and South Asia

Erik J. Dahl

Associate Professor of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California

Erik Dahl is the author of Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond (Georgetown University Press, 2013).  He is former chair of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association, and he is currently working on a book on the intelligence and warning failures of the coronavirus pandemic.

Areas of Interest: Intelligence, homeland security, terrorism

Anita Dancs

Professor of Economics, Director of Cultures Program, and Chair of the Department of Arts and Humanities at Western New England University

Anita Dancs writes on the military, the U.S. economy, and the economics of war. She has been interviewed extensively by national media including CNN, CNBC, and Marketplace, and her research has been covered by the Washington Post, New York Times, and Associated Press among others. Dancs was research director of the National Priorities Project, and has been a staff economist with the Center for Popular Economics, making economics more accessible to the general population. 

Areas of Interest: International aid, homeland security

Anila Daulatzai

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Anila Daulatzai has a PhD in Anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University, and is currently a 2020-21 Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on heroin users in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on the return of polio to Pakistan. Her dissertation is entitled, War and What Remains: Everyday Life in Contemporary Kabul, Afghanistan, based on four years of ethnographic research on widowhood and everyday life amidst serial wars.

Jason Davidson

Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, University of Mary Washington

Prof. Davidson is the author of four books: America’s Entangling Alliances: 1778 to the Present (Georgetown University Press, 2020); with Fabrizio Coticchia Italian Foreign Policy During Matteo Renzi’s Government: A Domestically-Focused Outsider and the World (Lexington Books, 2019); The Origins of Revisionist and Status-quo States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and America's Allies and War: Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He earned a Ph.D. (2001) and an M.A. (1999) in government from Georgetown University and a B.A. (1996) in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Areas of Interest: United States allies and war

Antonio De Lauri

Research Professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute

Antonio De Lauri is a Research Professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, and the Director of the Norwegian Centre for Humanitarian Studies. He has conducted ethnographic research in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Europe and has published extensively on issues related to war, human rights, freedom, and humanitarianism. Antonio is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Public Anthropologist. In 2018, he also created Public Anthropologist blog. He is the founding General Editor of Berghahn Books' series Humanitarianism and Security.

Omar Dewachi

Associate Professor, SAS, Medical Anthropology, Rutgers University

In 2008, Omar Dewachi graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology. Dewachi has worked on Iraqi medical doctors, their role in the formation of the Iraqi state, migration to the UK and integration in the British National Health Service (NHS). Dewachi’s current research is on war injuries and patients seeking healthcare outside Iraq.

Areas of Interest: Iraq, refugees, public health, displacement

Ryan D. Edwards

Senior Data Scientist, UCSF; Research Associate, Berkeley Population Center; UC Berkeley

Ryan Edwards' studies focus on the interrelated causes and consequences of health, mortality, and economic well being.  

Areas of Interest: Macroeconomic costs of war, military spending

Cynthia Enloe

Research Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Department of International Development, Community and the Environment (IDCE), Clark University (Massachusetts)

Cynthia Enloe received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Among Enloe’s books are Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (updated edition, 2014); The Curious Feminist (2004); Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (2007), and Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (2010). Enloe’s latest book is Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered (2013).

Areas of Interest: Militarization, women, gender, political activism

Elisa Epstein

Law Student, Advocacy Officer

Elisa Epstein is currently a law student at the University of Chicago. Until August 2021, she was the Washington Advocacy Officer at Human Rights Watch where she conducted advocacy with the US government on national security and foreign policy. Prior to that, she worked at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, and held internships with the Department of Defense and other organizations. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago.

Areas of Interest: National Security, Foreign Policy, Torture, Human Rights

Matthew Evangelista

President White Professor of History and Political Science in the Department of Government at Cornell University

Matthew Evangelista teaches courses in international and comparative politics. He is the author of five books including: The Chechen Wars (2002); Law, Ethics, and the War on Terror (2008); and Gender, Nationalism, and War (2011). He is the editor of Peace Studies, 4 vols. (2005), and co-editor of Do the Geneva Conventions Matter? (2017); The American Way of Bombing (2014); Partners or Rivals? European-American Relations after Iraq (2005); New Wars, New Laws? Applying the Laws of War in 21st Century Conflicts (2005); and Democracy and Security (2008).

Areas of Interest: Alternatives to military action, gender and conflict

Suzanne Fiederlein

Interim Director, Center for International Stabilization and Recovery, James Madison University

Since joining CISR in 1999, Suzanne Fiederlein has worked on a range of projects, including victim assistance and casualty data, Mine Risk Education, and International Mine Action Standards. As coordinator of management training, she directs the ERW/Mine Action Senior Managers’ Courses held at JMU and in regional locations (Croatia, Tajikistan, Vietnam). She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (Univ. of Arizona), and has taught on the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University as well as at JMU.

Areas of Interest: Clearance of explosive remnants of war, post-conflict stabilization and recovery

Brendan M. Fischer

Director, Federal Reform, Campaign Legal Center

Areas of Interest: Civil liberties (domestic, international)  

Peter Gill

Journalist

From 2014-2021, Peter Gill was based in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he covered politics, the environment, and human rights issues for the Nepali and international press. He speaks English and Nepali fluently, and Spanish, Hindi, and Wolof at an intermediate level. Gill currently reports on central Ohio’s immigrant and refugee communities for The Columbus Dispatch.

Areas of Interest: Human Rights, Nepal, Politics, War

Lyle Goldstein

Visiting Professor of International and Public Affairs

Lyle J. Goldstein is a Visiting Professor at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. At Brown, he is investigating the costs of great power competition with both China and Russia in association with the Costs of War Project at Watson. He is also assisting in the further development of Watson’s China Initiative. Goldstein serves concurrently as Director of Asia Engagement at the Washington think-tank Defense Priorities, which advocates for realism and restraint in U.S. defense policy. In this role, he is overseeing a range of studies that evaluate U.S. foreign policy and defense strategy in the Asia-Pacific region, including with respect to such key flashpoints as the Korean Peninsula, the South China Sea, the Sino-Indian border, and also the status of Taiwan. He maintains expertise in both Chinese and Russian military strategic development, and also has expertise on particular issues in the China-Russia relationship, including especially the Arctic and also Central Asia. In Oct 2021, Goldstein retired after 20 years of service on the faculty at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC) after being promoted by his peers to the rank of Full Professor. During his career at NWC, he founded the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) and has been awarded the Superior Civilian Service Medal for this achievement.  He has written or edited seven books on Chinese strategy and continues to work on a book length project that examines the nature of China-Russia relations in the 21st century.  Goldstein has his PhD from Princeton, an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and his BA from Harvard.  He is fluent in both Chinese and Russian languages, and is now studying Korean. He tweets regularly on both Chinese and Russian strategic matters at @lylegoldstein.

Areas of Interest: Russia, China, U.S. foreign policy, defense policy, militarism.

Roberto González

Professor of Cultural Anthropology at San José State University

Roberto J. González is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses upon science, technology, and society; militarization and culture; processes of social and cultural control; and ethics in social science. He has conducted ethnographic research in Latin America and the United States. Professor González has taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses for the anthropology department since joining the faculty in 2001. He has published many articles in academic journals, newspapers, and other periodicals. Professor González has authored several books including Zapotec Science: Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca (2001), Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power (2004), American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain(2009), Militarizing Culture: Essays on the Warfare State (2010), and the co-edited volumes Up, Down, and Sideways: Anthropologists Trace the Pathways of Power (2014) and Militarization: A Reader (2019). Professor González also co-produced the documentary film Losing Knowledge: 50 Years of Change (2013). His most recent books are Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network (2020) and War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future(2022).

Areas of Interest: technology, anthropology, culture, environment, militarization, ethics, power, ethnography

Lisa Graves

President of the Board of the Center for Media and Democracy and President of True North Research

Lisa Graves has testified as an expert witness before US Congress on national security. Graves’ former leadership posts include serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the US Department of Justice; Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the US Courts; Chief Counsel for Nominations for the US Senate Judiciary Committee; Senior Legislative Strategist for the ACLU; and Deputy Director of the Center for National Security Studies. 

Areas of Interest: Civil liberties (domestic, international)

Jennifer Greenburg

Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Sheffield

Jennifer Greenburg is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Sheffield in the UK. She is a feminist political geographer working on areas of war, gender, and humanitarianism. Her first book, At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023), reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. Another dimension of her work is grounded in Haiti, where she is concerned with the violence and securitized legacy of humanitarian interventions. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley and has held fellowships at Stanford University and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She is a contributor to the Costs of War project and her recent publications appear in Antipode, Critical Military Studies, Development and Change, and Gender, Place, and Culture. 

Areas of Interest: War, gender, U.S. hegemony, race, humanitarianism, Haiti.

Bridget Guarasci

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Franklin & Marshall College

Bridget Guarasci is an environmental anthropologist whose work examines how war and conflict generate ecological life in the Arab majority world. Her book manuscript Ecology of War: Iraq’s Marshes on the Battlegrounds of War considers how multinational investments in the biodiversity conservation of Iraq’s southern marshes during the US occupation and UN reconstruction era facilitated their extraction of oil and water in the same geological field.

Areas of Interest: War, migration, waterworlds, ecology, nature, materiality

Photo of Hugh Gusterson

Hugh Gusterson

Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia

Hugh Gusterson teaches and conducts research on militarism, nuclear weapons, and ethics, among other topics. In the United States and Russia, he has studied the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists. Gusterson is the author of Nuclear Rites (1996), People of the Bomb (2004), and Drone (2016); and co-editor of The Militarization Reader (2019), Life by Algorithms (2019), The Insecure American (2009), Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong (2005), and Cultures of Insecurity (1999).

Areas of Interest: Nuclear weapons, counterinsurgency, ethics, neoliberalism

William D. Hartung

Senior Research Fellow, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget. He was previously the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy and the co-director of the Center's Sustainable Defense Task Force. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008). His previous books include And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995), a critique of U.S. arms sales policies from the Nixon through Clinton administrations. From July 2007 through March 2011, Mr. Hartung was the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Prior to that, he served as the director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. He also worked as a speechwriter and policy analyst for New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams. Hartung’s articles on security issues have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the World Policy Journal. He has been a featured expert on national security issues on CBS 60 Minutes, NBC Nightly News, the PBS Newshour, CNN, Fox News, and scores of local, regional, and international radio outlets.

Areas of Interest: Pentagon spending, military contracting, arms sales, Iraq

Sarah Hautzinger

Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, Colorado College

Sarah Hautzinger’s research emphasizes the institutional processes related to violence at transnational, state, and interpersonal levels. With Jean Scandlyn she co-authored Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror (2014) and “A Better Way to Deal with PTSD” (2014).

Jennifer Heath

Independent Scholar, writer, editor, and curator

Jennifer Heath is an independent scholar, curator, award-winning activist, cultural journalist, and author/editor of fifteen books, including Book of the Disappeared: A Quest for Transnational Justice (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press – co-edited with Ashraf Zahedi); Children of Afghanistan: The Path to Peace (with Zahedi, University of Texas Press, 2014); Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women (with Zahedi, University of California Press, 2011); The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (University of California Press, 2008), The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam (Paulist Press, 2004); and A House White With Sorrow: A Ballad for Afghanistan (1996).  She founded Seeds for Afghanistan and the Afghanistan Relief Organization Midwife Training and Infant Care Program. Among the touring exhibitions she has curated are Water, Water Everywhere: Paean to a Vanishing Resource; The Map is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths-Palestinians, Native Americans, Irish; and The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces.

Areas of Interest: Women, gender, children, Afghanistan

James Heintz

Andrew Glyn Professor of Economics and Associate Director, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

James Heintz has published widely on employment, economic policy, labor standards, international trade, clean energy, and human rights. He has worked with the International Labor Organization, the United Nations Development Program, the UN Research Institute for Social Development, and the Economic Commission for Africa. Part of his work has involved examining the relationships between economic policy and social and economic rights in conjunction with various human rights organizations.

Areas of Interest: Economic policy and employment, global labor standards, human rights

Alison Howell

Associate Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University, Newark

Alison Howell’s research explores the politics of medicine in global affairs, with a focus on mental health, security, and global governance. She is the author of Madness in International Relations: Psychology, Security and the Global Governance of Mental Health (2011). She has also published in the areas of gender and foreign policy and the politics of detention and mental health reform in Iraq.

Areas of Interest: Veterans, families

Dahr Jamail

Author

Dahr Jamail is the author of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption (The New Press, 2019), a finalist for the E.O. Wilson/PEN/E.O. Wilson Science Writing Award. Jamail has won numerous other awards including the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism and the Izzy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Independent Media. He is also the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket, 2007).

Jennifer Walkup Jayes

Jennifer Walkup Jayes is a researcher and organizer. She earned her Master's in Public Anthropology from American University, where her thesis centered on alternatives to the war paradigm for counterterrorism. Jennifer works with refugees in Pittsburgh, PA. 

Areas of Interest: Counterterrorism, human impacts of war, social change

Jessica Katzenstein

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University, National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and Visiting Scholar at Arizona State University

Jessica Katzenstein is a cultural anthropologist of U.S. police. Her current book project, titled Police Common Sense: Labor, Violence, and the Productive Failures of Reform, ethnographically traces how officers in Maryland absorb and obstruct reform efforts. Jessica's research interests include state violence, militarization, surveillance, labor, and white supremacy. She holds a PhD from Brown University, and her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Center for Engaged Scholarship.

Areas of Interest: Militarization, U.S. policing, racism, surveillance, privacy

Deepa Kumar

Professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University.

Deepa Kumar is an award-winning scholar and public intellectual. She is Professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her critically acclaimed book Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (2012) has been translated into five languages. The fully revised and updated second edition titled Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire: 20 Years Since 9/11 (2021) marks twenty years of the War on Terror. Dr. Kumar has authored more than 80 publications including books, journal articles, book chapters, and articles in independent and mainstream media. She has shared her expertise in numerous media outlets such as the BBC, The New York Times, NPR, USA Today, the Danish Broadcast Corporation, TeleSur and other national and international news media outlets. 

Areas of Interest: Media, Journalism, Terrorism, Islamophobia

Ken MacLeish

Assistant Professor, Center for Medicine, Health and Society, Department of Anthropology, Vanderbilt University

Ken MacLeish is the author of Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013), an ethnography exploring the everyday experience of war for soldiers, military families, and other military community members. His current research examines how politics and morality shape ideas about soldier suicide and military behavioral health.

Areas of Interest: Suicide, armed forces, demographics

Mazzarino headshot

Andrea Mazzarino

Andrea Mazzarino co-founded Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She is an activist and social worker interested in the health impacts of war and in children’s and disability rights. She has held various clinical, research, and advocacy positions, including at the Veterans Affairs PTSD Outpatient Clinic, with Human Rights Watch, and at a community mental health agency.

Megan K. McBride

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a Research Analyst

Megan McBride is currently working on her Ph.D. in Religious Studies, focusing on religious violence and terrorism, at Brown University. She has an M.A. in Liberal Arts from the Great Books program at St. John's College, and an M.A. in Government from Johns Hopkins University where her thesis led to the article, "The Logic of Terrorism: Existential Anxiety, the Search for Meaning, and Terrorist Ideologies" (Terrorism and Political Violence, 2011).

Areas of Interest: Terrorist threats, Iraq war

Robert Miller

Associate Professor of Pulmonary Medicine, Vanderbilt University

Robert Miller was the principal investigator in a project evaluating service members with exercise limitation following service in Iraq and Afghanistan (“Constrictive Bronchiolitis in Soldiers Returning from Iraq and Afghanistan,” New England Journal of Medicine, 2011). He is now collaborating with other institutions and governmental agencies to further characterize the disorder and define appropriate compensation for those affected.

Areas of Interest: Respiratory disease, Iraq war, veterans

Norah Niland

UAI/United Against Inhumanity Executive Committee Member

Norah Niland is Co-Founder and Executive Member of United Against Inhumanity (UAI) and Research Associate at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peace-building at The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. She has spent much of her professional life with the United Nations, focused on humanitarian, human rights, and development issues. During her last UN assignment, Niland was the Director of Human Rights in UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and Representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Currently, Norah is focused on advancing the agenda of United Against Inhumanity.

Areas of Interest: Afghanistan, government, women, social change

Miriam Pemberton

Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies

Miriam Pemberton has studied the U.S. military economy and the means of shrinking it down to size for decades, first as Director of the National Commissionfor Economic Conversion and Disarmament and then as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. With Lawrence Korb, she headed the task force that for most of a decade produced the annual "Unified Security Budget of the United States." With William Hartung she edited Lessons From Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm, 2008).  She has just published Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies (Routledge, 2022).  She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. 

Areas of Interest: Climate security, military, economy, environment

Nicola Pratt

Associate Professor of International Politics of the Middle East, University of Warwick, UK

Nicola Pratt is co-author of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009) and co-editor of Women and War in the Middle East (2009), both with Nadje Al-Ali. Her current research is on gender and the politics of insecurity in the Middle East. 

Areas of Interest: Women, gender, Iraq, Middle East

Kali Rubaii

Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University

Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University, interested in sharpening resistance strategies that target the vulnerable nexus between coercive power and the physical world.

Her research explores the environmental impacts of less-than-lethal militarism, and how military projects (re)arrange political ecologies in the name of “letting live.” Her book project, Counter-resurgency, examines how farmers in Anbar, Iraq struggle to survive and recover from transnational counterinsurgency projects.

She is currently conducting fieldwork for two ethnographic projects: Taking toxicity as an analytic for material politics, she is working with a team of doctors, epidemiologists, and environmental activists to document the links between the epidemic of birth defects in Fallujah and military environmental damage. She is also researching the corporate-military enterprise of concrete production in post-invasion Iraq and how it enforces global regimes of class and citizenship.  Displacement, ecologies of war, spatial politics, forensic ethnography, health justice, Middle East

Areas of Interest: Displacement, ecologies of war, spatial politics, forensic ethnography, health justice, Middle East

Zainab Saleh

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Coordinator of Middle East and Islamic Studies, Haverford College

Zainab Saleh is the author of Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia (2020). Currently, she is working on a book entitled Uprooted Memories: Citizenship, Denaturalization, and Deportation in Iraq. Her work appeared in Arab Studies Journal, American Anthropologist, and Anthropology News.

Areas of Interest: Iraq, Empire, displacement, selfhood, nostalgia

Jean Scandlyn

Research Associate Professor, Departments of Health and Behavioral Sciences and Anthropology, University of Colorado Denver

A medical anthropologist, Jean Scandlyn also holds a master’s degree in nursing. She is co-author (with Sarah Hautzinger) of Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress: Homefront Struggles with the Wars on Terror (2014).

Areas of Interest: Medical anthropology, global health

Stephen Semler

Co-founder of Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI)

Stephen Semler is co-founder of Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI), a think tank that works to align U.S. foreign policy with working-class interests. He also writes Polygraph, a data journalism newsletter. He has previously worked in the international humanitarian response to Syria, U.S. federal budget authorizations and appropriations, and policy analysis and advocacy. He is a listed expert with the Forum on the Arms Trade and Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Areas of Interest: U.S. foreign policy, militarism, U.S. federal budget, humanitarian responses

Mac Skelton

Executive Director of the Institute of Regional and International Studies (IRIS) at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS)

Mac Skelton’s research has focused on how Iraq's ongoing cancer crisis is understood by Iraqi families seeking cancer care abroad. He conducted fieldwork at a Beirut hotel where hundreds of Iraqi cancer patients have lodged over the past few years due to the war-related deterioration of medical care in Iraq. 

Areas of Interest: Medical anthropology

Brian Smith

Assistant Professor of Political Science at Nazarbayev University

Brian Smith is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Nazarbayev University. He specializes in political theory, the history of political thought, and military ethics. He has recently published a book on Locke and immigration, John Locke, Territory, and Transmigration (Routledge, 2021) and has another book under contract with Brill that chronicles the history of arguments for killing the innocent. His work has appeared in History of Political Thought, Seventeenth Century, Polity, Science and Society, Philosophy and Literature, and elsewhere.

Areas of Interest: Military ethics, humanitarian intervention and transitional justice

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Anthropologist and Film-Maker

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist and film-maker with extensive fieldwork experience in Israel/Palestine and in Greece. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, 2019), has won five major book awards, and examines waste management in the absence of a state. She has also published on the relationship between waste and environmental impact assessments, electricity services, climate change adaptation, humanitarian aid, and the idea of heritage in the West Bank, as well as on the impacts of short-term rentals on local and displaced communities in the West Bank and Athens, Greece. Her second book, which explores the impacts of Airbnb on property ownership in Athens, is under contract with Duke University Press. She is beginning fieldwork on a next project on the rise of "demand avoidance" as diagnosis and lived experience for autistic people. Her work has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and an Msc. in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford. She serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and Critical AI. More on her scholarship and film-making can be found here: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com/. 

Areas of Interest: Israel/Palestine, Greece, ecologies of war, infrastructure, property ownership, disability, neurodivergence, health

Jessica Stern

Researcher, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Jessica Stern is the author of several books and numerous articles on terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. She served on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff, and as an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Stern is a member of the Trilateral Commission and of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Areas of Interest: Terrorist threats

Astri Suhrke

Researcher Emerita

Astri Suhrke has been a professor of international relations at the American University in Washington DC, a journalist writing for Norwegian newspapers, and a senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway, where she is now researcher emerita. She has published widely on  the social, political and humanitarian consequences of violent conflict, and strategies of response. Her geographic areas of research are Southeast Asia (Thailand), South Asia (India and Nepal) and Southwest Asia (Afghanistan). Her major work on Afghanistan is the book When More is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan (London 2011).

Photograph of Thomas Suitt

Thomas H. "Ben" Suitt, III

PhD, Graduate Program in Religion, Boston University

Ben Suitt is the author of Narratives of Trauma and Moral Agency Among Christian Post-9/11 Veterans (Springer Nature Switzerland Publishing, 2023) and Finding Resonance Amid Trauma: Moral Injury and the Role of Religion Among Christian Post-9/11 U.S. Veterans (2021). A graduate of Boston University, Dr. Suitt’s research investigates the role of religion in the lives of U.S. military veterans as they navigate between competing identities and cultures amid the disruptive experiences of war and trauma. His current research places religion in conversation with military ethics and the use of force, moral injury, sociology of morality, and Christian moral thought.

Areas of Interest: Sociology of religion in the military, moral injury, and military ethics

Letta Tayler

Associate Director in the Crisis and Conflict Division of Human Rights Watch

Letta Tayler is an Associate Director in the Crisis and Conflict Division of Human Rights Watch, where she leads the division's work on terrorism and counterterrorism. Her focus includes United Nations counterterrorism policy, US drone strikes and other lethal targeting, and measures relating to foreign ISIS suspects and family members. Tayler has worked in more than three dozen countries as a human rights defender and in her previous capacity as a journalist. She has presented her findings to international and regional organizations including the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, and the European Parliament. Tayler’s work has been featured in media including The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, CNN, Fresh Air, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!, and Elle.  She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Barnard College and a master’s in international human rights law from the University of Oxford.

Areas of Interest: Human Rights, Terrorism, Counterterrorism

Photograph of Ali Tayyeb

Ali R. Tayyeb PhD, RN

Assistant Professor, Patricia A. Chin School of Nursing, California State University, Los Angeles

Dr. Ali R. Tayyeb is a United States Navy Veteran, having served as a Fleet Marine Force Corpsman with Naval Medical Center San Diego, 1st Marine Division, and 3rd Marine Division. After his military service, Dr. Tayyeb pursued his career as a Registered Nurse, earning his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Nursing from California State University, Los Angeles and his Ph.D. from the University of San Diego. Dr. Tayyeb’s experiences in the healthcare field include combat trauma, emergency medicine, education, Human Patient Simulation, Professional Development, Leadership, Veterans Healthcare, and Policy. Dr. Tayyeb is a Jonas Veterans Healthcare Scholar Alumni, is currently an Assistant Professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and is the Creator, Producer, and Host of the RN-Mentor Podcast and Blog. His interests in Veterans related research include: Transition from military service, Post-Traumatic Stress, Traumatic Brain Injuries, Depression, Alcohol and Drug abuse, Pain, Suicide, Family environment, Disenfranchisement, Policy, Advocacy, Culture, Veteran Benefits & Reintegration. Dr. Tayyeb’s research and publications on “Bad Paper” Veterans have been cited on numerous books, white papers, Schools of Law, advocacy organizations, State policies, congressional testimonies, publications, dissertations, and more. Though Dr. Tayyeb’s research is primarily veteran centric, he is ANCC nationally board certified in Nursing Professional Development and greatly invested in professional development, role development, and pushing the boundaries of the nursing profession through diversity of people, thought, advocacy, and the arts.

Areas of Interest: Military/Veteran Health, Veteran Policy, Veteran Reintegration

Zeeshan Usmani

Founder, Pakistan Body Count; Co-founder and CEO Go-Fig Solutions

Zeeshan Usmani is the founder of PakistanBodyCount, the running tally of drone and suicide attacks in Pakistan. Dr. Usmani is working on two books on suicide bombings and drone attacks in Pakistan. Currently he is the CEO of Go-Fig Solutions, which focuses on technologies for protecting the lives of civilians.

Areas of Interest: Violence

David Vine

Ph.D., M.A.

David Vine is a political anthropologist and writer. David is the author of a trilogy of books about war and peace including "The United States of War: A Global History of America’s Endless Conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State," which was a finalist for the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. The other books are "Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia" and "Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World." David was a professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, DC, for 18 years (2006-2024), achieving the rank of full professor in 2018. See davidvine.net and basenation.us for more information.

Areas of Interest: refugees/displacement, military bases, war/peace, militarization

Winslow T. Wheeler

Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information and Former Research Fellow at the Independent Institute

Winslow Wheeler is the author of The Wastrels of Defense (2004) and Military Reform (2007), and the editor of the anthology The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You through It (2011). From 1971 to 2002, Wheeler worked on national security issues for members of the US Senate and for the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). In the Senate, Wheeler advised Jacob K. Javits (R-NY), Nancy L. Kassebaum (R-KS), David Pryor (D-AR), and Pete V. Domenici (R-NM). He was the first and last Senate staffer to work simultaneously on the staffs of a Republican and a Democrat.

Areas of Interest: Department of Defense budget

Zoë H. Wool

Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Mississauga

Zoë Wool has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with grievously injured US soldiers and their families living at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as well as at other military sites in the US and abroad. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles about the ongoing effects of war in soldiers’ lives as well as the monograph After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed.

Areas of Interest: Social and economic impact of war on veterans, families

Bassam Yousif

Associated Dean (CAS) and Professor, Department of Economics, Indiana State University

Bassam Yousif regularly presents and has written extensively on the economic development and political economy of the Middle East, concentrating on Iraq. His work has led to policy consulting and numerous invited lectures. Yousif's book on the development history of Iraq, Human Development in Iraq, 1950-1990, was published by Routledge in 2012. His current research centers on the political economy of revolt in the Arab world.

Areas of Interest: Development, political economy of the Middle East

Anna Zogas

Post-Doctoral Fellow, Center for Healthcare Organization & Implementation Research, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Anna Zogas’s research is about the symbolic transformation of mild traumatic brain injury into into a “signature wound of war” in the post-9/11 era. Her fieldwork at a VA Medical Center focused on how clinicians collected information about these injuries, and how interactions between veterans and clinicians were shaped by the recent intensification of media, military, and VA attention to mild traumatic brain injury.

Areas of Interest: cultural and political dimensions of medical knowledge, American institutions, rehabilitation