Faculty Directors
Professor Steven Fish, Political Science
Professor Fish's research and teaching interests include post-Soviet politics, democratization and regime change, and general comparative politics. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics. Professor Fish recently spent six months in Indonesia researching the relationship between political Islam, democracy and political competition. He is the author of Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1995) and a coauthor of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2001). Professor Fish received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1993.
Ron E. Hassner's research revolves around symbolic and emotive aspects of international security with particular attention to religious violence, Middle Eastern politics and territorial disputes. His publications have focused on the role of perceptions in entrenching international disputes, the causes and characteristics of conflicts over sacred places, the characteristics of political-religious leadership and political-religious mobilization and the role of national symbols in conflict. He is a graduate of Stanford University with degrees in political science and religious studies. Professor Hassner was a fellow of the MacArthur Consortium on Peace and Security in 2000-3. In 2003-4 he was a post-doctoral scholar at the Olin Institute for International Security, Harvard University. In 2006, UC Berkeley students named him one of their "everyday heroes".
Visit Professor Hassner's website about his new book, War on Sacred Grounds
