Liaquat Ali Khan is a professor of law at the Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kan. A native of Pakistan, he focuses his research on terrorism and conflict in Muslim societies. He has written extensively about Islamic law and in 2008 wrote an article for The American Muslim about Islamic perspectives on the economic meltdown.

Mark S. Hamm is a professor of criminology at Indiana State University in Terre Haute who specializes in terrorism, in particular right-wing extremism.

Stuart A. Wright is chair of the sociology department at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. He has written numerous books and articles on religion and violence. He is an expert on government raids on small religious groups suspected of being extremists, like the Branch Davidians. He has studied the relationship between governments, law enforcement officials […]

David Schanzer is director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security in Durham, N.C. He is also a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University and an adjunct professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina.

Ami Pedahzur is a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has written on political extremism and terrorism, in particular in Israel. His most recent book is Jewish Terrorism in Israel (2009).

Ralph W. Hood Jr. is a psychology professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He writes and teaches on the psychology of religious fundamentalism.

Lee C. Camp is a professor of theology at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn., and author of Who is My Enemy?: Questions American Christians Must Face About Islam — and Themselves. Camp wrote an Aug. 25, 2011, column for the website Patheos titled “Is Christian Just War Just Like Jihad?,” which argues that Christian and Islamic views […]

Robert W. Hefner is an anthropology professor and director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University. Since 1991 he has also directed the institute’s program on Islam and society. His many books include (as editor) Shari’a Politics: Islamic Law and Society in the Modern World and (as co-editor) Schooling Islam: The […]

Clark McCauley Jr. is Rachel C. Hale Professor of Mathematics and the Sciences and co-director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College. His research focuses on the psychological foundations of ethnic conflict and genocide. At the April 2011 conference at Fordham, McCauley argued that “ideology and religion are more rationalization […]