Minerva Chairs Program

Army War College

Dr. Robert J. Bunker is Distinguished Visiting Professor and Minerva Chair at the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. He is also Adjunct Faculty, School of Politics and Economics (SPE), Claremont Graduate University. Past professional associations include Futurist in Residence (FIR), Training and Development Division, Behavioral Science Unit (BSU), FBI Academy, Quantico; CEO, Counter-OPFOR Corporation; Adjunct Faculty, School of Policy, Planning, and Development (PPD), University of Southern California; Terrorism Instructor, California Specialized Training Institute (CSTI), California Office of Emergency Services (OES); Staff Member (Consultant), Counter-OPFOR Program, National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center-West (NLECTC-West); Fellow, Institute of Land Warfare (ILW), Association of the US Army (AUSA); Adjunct Faculty, National Security Studies M.A. Program and Political Science Department, California State University San Bernardino; and Faculty, Unconventional Warfare M.A. Distance Education Program, American Military University. Dr. Bunker holds university degrees in political science, government, social science, anthropology-geography, behavioral science, and history. He has delivered over two-hundred presentations- including papers and training- to military, law enforcement, academic and policy audiences including US Congressional Testimony. He has over two-hundred publications ranging from edited books and booklets through reports, chapters, articles/essays, response guidance, subject bibliographies and encyclopedia entries in academic, policy, military and law enforcement venues. Among those are the work Red Teams and Counterterrorism Training (with Steve Sloan) and the edited works including Criminal Insurgencies in Mexico and the Americas: The Gangs and Cartels Wage War; Narcos Over the Border: Gangs, Cartels and Mercenaries; Criminal-States and Criminal-Soldiers; Networks, Terrorism and Global Insurgencies; and Non-State Threats and Future Wars.

Dr. Jeff McCausland, Colonel, US Army (retired) is a Distinguished Professor of Research and the Minerva Chair holder at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, with research emphasizing new approaches in deterrence. He is also a Visiting Professor of International Security Affairs at Dickinson College. Dr. McCausland is a retired Colonel, holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and is a West Point graduate. His military assignments included: the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans, Army Staff; command of an artillery battalion during the Gulf War; Dean of the Army War College; and Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control, National Security Council Staff, the White House. Since retiring from active duty he has served as a Chaired Professor of Leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy and subsequently a Visiting Professor at the Penn State Graduate School of International Affairs. Dr. McCausland is also a Senior Fellow at both the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the Naval Academy. He has published and lectured broadly both in the United States and in numerous foreign countries on national security affairs, NATO, the wars in Afghanistan/Iraq, and leadership development.

Air University  --currently accepting applications for 2013 (info)

Marine Corps University  --currently accepting applications for 2013 (info)

Dr. Cigar is Director of Regional Studies and the Minerva Research Initiative Chair at the Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia. Before retiring, he was on the staff of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and the Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting, where he taught military theory, strategy and policy, military history, and regional studies. Previously, he was a senior political-military analyst in the Pentagon, where he was responsible for the Middle East in the Office of the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, and supported the Secretary of the Army, the Chief of Staff of the Army, and Congress with intelligence. He also represented the Army on national-level intelligence issues with the inter-agency intelligence community. During the Gulf War, he was the Army's senior political-military intelligence staff officer on the Desert Shield/Desert Storm Task Force.

He is the author of numerous works on politics and security issues dealing with the Middle East and the Balkans, and has been a consultant at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. He has also taught at the National Defense Intelligence College and was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Conflict Analysis & Resolution, George Mason University. He is now focusing on the strategic and military aspects of radical Islamic movements and on proliferation issues.

Dr. Cigar holds a D. Phil. from Oxford (St Antony's College) in Middle East History and Arabic; a Master of International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs, and a Certificate from the Middle East Institute, Columbia University; and a Master of Science in Strategic Intelligence from the National Defense Intelligence College. He has studied and traveled widely in the Middle East.

Naval War College  --currently accepting applications for 2013

Dr. McFate is a cultural anthropologist who works on defense and national security issues. Currently, she is the Minerva Chair at the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Formerly, she was the Senior Social Scientist for the US Army's Human Terrain System. She has held positions at a variety of think tanks, including RAND and the Institute for Defense Analyses. She also worked at the US Navy's Office of Naval Research, where she was awarded a Distinguished Public Service Award by the Secretary of the Navy. She has served on the Army Science Board and the Defense Science Board, and was an instructor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Dr. McFate received a B.A. from University of California at Berkeley, a PhD in Anthropology from Yale University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Her PhD dissertation concerned British counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland. She has published in such journals as Journal of Conflict Studies, Military Review and Joint Forces Quarterly. Additionally, she was one of the primary contributors to Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency. She is a native of Marin County, California.

Dr. Murray graduated from Yale University in 1963 with honors in history. He then served five years as an officer in the United States Air Force, including a tour in Southeast Asia with the 314th Tactical Airlift Wing (C-130s). He returned to Yale University where he received his Ph.D. in military-diplomatic history, working under Hans Gatzke and Donald Kagan. He taught two years in the Yale history department before moving on to Ohio State University in fall 1977 as a military and diplomatic historian. He received the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award in 1987. He took early retirement from Ohio State in 1995 as Professor Emeritus of History.

Dr. Murray has taught at a number of academic and military institutions, including the Air War College, the United States Military Academy, and the Naval War College. He has also served as a Secretary of the Navy Fellow at the Navy War College, the Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, the Matthew C. Horner Professor of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University, the Charles Lindbergh Chair at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum, and the Harold K. Johnson Professor of Military History at the Army War College. At present he is a consultant at the Institute of Defense Analyses, where he has been working on the Iraqi Perspectives Project, and has just completed two years as the distinguished visiting professor of naval heritage and history at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.

In the 2011-2012 academic year Dr. Murray completed the manuscript on the Iran-Iraq War, which has now been released by DoD' Office of Public Affairs. It has been sent to Cambridge University Press for potential publication. Additionally Dr. Murray completed an edited manuscript on "Successful Strategies" for the Office of Net Assessment, and with Professor Peter Mansoor of The Ohio State University published an edited volume Hybrid War with Cambridge University Press. During the year Dr. taught an elective on the wars of the Middle East in the twentieth century at the Naval War College and a seminar in the "Strategy and Policy" course at that institution.

Sarah Sewall has worked at the nexus of national security and humanitarianism throughout her career in government, academia, and non-governmental organizations. She currently teaches at the Harvard Kennedy School and is program director for two of the Center's programs: Mass Atrocity Response Operations (MARO) and National Security & Human Rights. Her research focuses on U.S. national security strategy, civil-military relations, and the ethics of fighting insurgencies and terrorism. She is completing, with John P. White, a year-long assessment of senior civil-military decision-making. In 2007, she founded the MARO Project to create a military concept of operations for intervening to halt mass atrocity. Her prior work with the U.S. military included writing the introduction to the University of Chicago edition of the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (2007). Sewall was the first U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance during the Clinton Administration. She previously had served for six years as Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell. Just prior to joining the Kennedy School, she edited The United States and the International Criminal Court (2002) at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She serves on the Center for Naval Analysis Defense Advisory Committee, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Offensive Information Operations and several non-profit boards. Educated at Harvard and Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, she lives in Wayland, MA with her husband, a State Representative, and their four daughters.

National War College at the National Defense University

Susan Ariel Aaronson serves in the Minerva Research Fellow Faculty Chair (Minerva Chair) at the National War College within National Defense University, while maintaining an Associate Research Professorship at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.

Aaronson is currently directing a project examining how the U.S., EU, and Canada use trade agreements to govern the Internet and to advance Internet freedom/stability. Her research is funded by MacArthur Foundation. While at GWU, Aaronson has also received recent grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation and Ford Motor Company for her work on corruption and business and human rights.

Dr. Aaronson is a frequent speaker on public understanding of globalization issues and regularly appears on VOA Issues and Opinions/China to discuss US and international economic developments. She was a regular commentator on "All Things Considered" in 1994-1995, "Marketplace" from 1995-1998, and "Morning Edition" from 1998-2001. She has also appeared on CNN, the BBC, and PBS to discuss trade and globalization issues. She has also been a Guest Scholar in Economics at the Brookings Institution (1995-1999).

Dr. Aaronson serves on the Advisory Board for Business-Human Rights and is a Senior External Advisor to the Business and Society Team of Oxford Analytica. In recent years, she has been a pro-bono advisor to the UN Special Representative on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights, and the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. She has also consulted for the ILO; the World Bank; Free the Slaves; the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative; the Stanley Foundation; several corporations; and the governments of Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands, among others.

The Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University

Dr. Natali is the Minerva Chair at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University (NDU). For the past nearly twenty years, she has lived, worked and conducted independent research in the Kurdish regions of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria, and is the author of numerous publications on Kurdish nationalism, politics, economy, and identity, including The Kurdish Quasi-State: Development and Dependency in Post-Gulf War Iraq (Syracuse University Press, 2010) and The Kurds and the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey and Iran (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), which received the 2006 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title (Trans to Turkish as Kurtler ve Devlet: Iraq, Turkiye ve Iran'da Ulusal Kimligin Gelismesi (Istanbul: Avesta Press, 2009)). Her current research is on the political-economy of federalism in Iraq and resource-based conflicts linked to energy sector development. She is writing a book on the changes and continuities in populations and places across the Kurdistan regions of Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria based on interviews and journals she has kept since the 1990 Gulf War.

Dr. Natali also specializes in post-conflict relief and reconstruction, having worked for INGOs and the US Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in Peshawar, Pakistan and post-Gulf War Iraqi Kurdistan respectively. Prior to her position at NDU, Dr. Natali was engaged in initiatives to develop the higher education sector in post-Saddam Iraqi Kurdistan, including the University of Kurdistan in Arbil and the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani, where she was the Academic Dean, Research Centers Director, Associate Professor, and Director of International Programs and Exchanges.

Dr. Natali received a Ph.D in political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of International Affairs (MIA) at Columbia University. Dr. Natali also has studied at the L'Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, University of Tehran, and Tel Aviv University. She speaks English, French, Kurdish, and conversational Farsi.

US Air Force Academy

Dr. Phil Fei-Ling Wang joins the U.S. Air Force Academy from Georgia Tech where he has been faculty in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs since 1993. His research focus is comparative and international political economy, and East Asia and China studies. He has published six books (two co-edited) in two languages, of which the most recent one is Organization through Division and Exclusion: China's Hukou System (Stanford University Press. 2005). In addition to numerous book chapters and reports, he has published dozens of articles in journals and newspapers such as The China Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Harvard International Review, International Herald Tribune, Journal of Contemporary China, Pacific Affairs and The Washington Quarterly as well as journals in China, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Korea and Singapore.

Before coming to Georgia Tech, Dr. Wang taught at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point). He has had numerous grants from U.S. and foreign sources and frequently appears in U.S. and international news media such as Al Jazeera, AP, BBC, Businessweek, China Business News, CNN, Financial Times, South China Morning Post, The New York Times, Radio China and Xinhua.

Wang has been a Member and an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, an adjunct/honorary professor of the Renmin University of China and Anhui Normal University in China, a visiting professor at Sciences Po in France and Hanyang University in Korea, a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Italy and the University of Tokyo in Japan, a Fulbright Professor in Yonsei University in Korea, and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore. Dr. Wang received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Charlotte Lee received a bachelor's degree in political economy and Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her Ph.D. program at Stanford University's political science department. Lee's dissertation Party Adaptation, Elite Training, and Political Selection in Reform-Era China explores how market incentives have shaped the behavior of organizations located within the Chinese Communist Party. She teaches courses on Chinese politics, comparative politics and international relations.

US Military Academy at West Point

Dr. Luke Gerdes joined the faculty as a Minerva Chair in the USMA Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership in March 2012. His research will combine network methodology with the study of Islam to better understand how socio-structural factors impact the formation of ideologies and shared values, particularly in Muslim Southeast Asia. This work will develop models of society to account for the connectivity of people, information, and resources through social, cultural, political, and spatial systems.

Dr. Gerdes most recently completed a visiting researcher position at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, where he facilitated the completion of a dynamic network model that examines operational, logistical, financial, ideological, training, familial, and friendship ties among individuals and organizations.

He is currently in the final stages of his Doctoral Program at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA). He has studied at the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism in Singapore, where he focused on extremism in Southeast Asia. He has also studied the Global Salafist movement at the Center of Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) at Carnegie Mellon.

Dr. Makame Muhajir is USMA's Department of Geography & Environmental Engineering Minerva Fellow for the Social, Spatial and Cultural Topologies of African Villages research project. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Kansas and specialized in Human Geography and Urban Planning. He has also served as the Director of Surveys and Urban Planning Department in Zanzibar, Tanzania and the Director of World Heritage City of Zanzibar's Urban Conservation Program. His research includes: Integrated collaborative urban and rural development programs in the urbanizing world and their localization within sub-Saharan African cities, Middle East, Asia, and Australasia and the evaluation of urban, political, and cultural dynamics within African indigenous environments, among other geographical study areas. He foresees beginning his residence at the Academy in June 2012.

US Naval Academy  --currently accepting applications for 2013 (info)

Dr. John Nagl is the inaugural Minerva Research Fellow in the Department of History at the U.S. Naval Academy. A West Point graduate and retired Army officer, he served in both wars in Iraq. Nagl earned his Master of the Military Arts and Sciences Degree from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, where he received the George C. Marshall Award as the top graduate, and his doctorate from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He is a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Visiting Professor in the War Studies Department at Kings College of London, and the former President of the Center for a New American Security. Nagl is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and was on the writing team that produced the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Dr. Nagl's research at the US Naval Academy focuses on American military culture in small wars. Throughout its history, the U.S. military has confronted opponents who used a combination of conventional and guerrilla warfare to negate the advantage of superior conventional forces. The project examines how the U.S. military came to understand the nature of the conflict in question, adapted and innovated to meet its demands, and subsequently made sense of (or ignored) the experience in developing its self-concept and organizational culture, with profound implications for its performance in future conflicts.