Dr. Gilles Kepel is a professor at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris and a research director for CNRS Paris. A prominent French scholar and analyst of the Islamic and Arab world, he is the author of several books and articles: Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam; The Revenge of God; Muslim Extremism in Egypt; Allah in the West and his most recent book The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West.

Dr. Kepel is fluent in French, English, Arabic, and Italian. He holds doctorate degrees from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris in political science and sociology

Amin Tarzi is the inaugural Director of Middle East Studies at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. Previously Dr. Tarzi was with RFE/RL's Regional Analysis team focusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan. While working at RFE/RL, Dr. Tarzi also taught courses in political Islam, cultural intelligence, terrorist organizations and similar topics at the Washington-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies. Prior to joining RFE/RL, Dr. Tarzi worked as Senior Research Associate for the Middle East at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies where his primary research emphasis was Iran and its missile and nuclear developments and policies. At the Monterey Institute, Dr. Tarzi also taught a graduate seminar on Middle East security policies and threat perceptions. His work experience includes the post of Political Advisor to the Saudi Arabian Mission at the United Nations where attended the informal "Friends of Afghanistan" group which included Iran, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia and United States. The informal group later gave way to the formal Six-Plus-Two structure. He has also held the position of Researcher/Analyst on Iranian affairs at the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research in Abu Dhabi. For a year in 1992, after the fall of the communist regime in Kabul, Dr. Tarzi served as a diplomat at the Afghan Mission to the UN.

Tarzi earned his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the Department of Middle East Studies at New York University. Tarzi's dissertation, entitled The Judicial State: Evolution and Centralization of the Courts in Afghanistan, 1883-1896 is under consideration for publication by Harvard Law School's Islamic Legal Studies Program. Dr. Tarzi and Professor Robert D. Crews of Stanford University have co-edited a volume entitled Taliban and the Crisis in Afghanistan, to be released in February 2008 by Harvard University Press.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of political science, and sociology by courtesy, and coordinator of the Democracy Program at CDDRL. He is a specialist on democratic development and regime change and on U.S. foreign policy affecting democracy abroad. His research examines comparative trends in the quality and stability of democracy in developing countries and post-communist states, and public opinion in new democracies. As a core member of the scientific team of the East Asia Barometer, he is investigating attitudes and values toward democracy in eight East Asian political systems. His research and policy analysis also address the relationship between democracy, governance and development in poor countries, particularly in Africa. In the past two years he has served as consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development and was a contributing author of its report, "Foreign Aid in the National Interest." He is also co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy, and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. He is now lecturing and writing about the challenges of post-conflict state-building in Iraq and other countries. He also recently served with a group of Europeans and Americans who produced a report on "Transatlantic Strategy for Democracy and Human Development in the Broader Middle East," published by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Diamond has written extensively on the factors that facilitate and obstruct democracy in developing countries and on problems of democracy, development, and corruption, particularly in Africa. He is the author of Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, and Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria. His recent edited books include Islam and Democracy in the Middle East (with Marc F. Plattner and Daniel Brumberg), Political Parties and Democracy (with Richard Gunther), The Global Resurgence of Democracy and The Global Divergence of Democracies (both with Marc F. Plattner), Consolidating Democracy in Korea (with Byung-Kook Kim), and Institutional Reform and Democratic Consolidation in Korea (with Doh Shin). Among his other 20 edited books are the series Democracy in Developing Countries (with Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset); The Self-Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies (with Andreas Schedler and Marc F. Plattner); and Democratization in Africa and Democracy in East Asia (both with Marc F. Plattner).

Diamond has lectured in more than 20 countries on problems of democratic development. He taught sociology at Vanderbilt University from 1980 to 1985 before joining Stanford and the Hoover Institution. He was a visiting scholar at the Academia Sinica (Taiwan, 1997-98) and a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Bayero University (Kano, Nigeria, 1982-83). He received all of his degrees from Stanford University, including a BA in 1974, an MA in 1978, and a PhD in sociology in 1980.

David Patel is a PhD candidate in Stanford's Dept of Political Science and,

beginning in Fall 2007, an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell

University. He is currently a pre-doctoral fellow with the Center on

Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

Mr. Patel will speak about changes in the communal support base of the

Jordanian Islamic Movement. He asks, why did a flourising Islamist movement,

capable of transcending Jordan's communal boundaries and shifting the broad

axes of social division, instead transform into an ethnic party in the

1990s? He argues the Transjordanian-dominated government, threatened by

Islamists' cross-communal appeal, purposely exploits communal divisions

within the Islamic Movement by engineering electoral rules, gerrymandering

districts, and provoking communally-divisive crises with the Movement. These

changes lead the Islamic Movement to increasingly cater to

Palestinian-Jordanian voters, which preserves national origin as the most

salient cleavage in Jordanian society.