Amr Hamzawy is Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a noted Egyptian political scientist who previously taught at Cairo University and the Free University of Berlin. Hamzawy has a deep knowledge of Middle East politics and specific expertise on the reform process in the region. His research interests include the changing dynamics of political participation in the Arab world, the role of Islamist opposition groups in Arab politics, with special attention both to Egypt and the Gulf countries.

Hamzawy's studies at Cairo University focused on civil society and democratization in the Arab world, Islamism, and the cultural impacts of globalization in Muslim majority societies. He received his Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin, where he worked as an assistant professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Some of his publications include The Saudi Labyrinth: Evaluating the Current Political

Opening, (Carnegie Paper 68, March 2006); Human Rights in the Arab World: Independent Voices, coedited with Anthony Chase, (University of Pennsylvania, 2006); Zeitgenössisches Arabisches Denken: Kontinuität und Wandel, (Verlag des Deutschen Orient-Instituts, 2005); Civil Society in the Middle East, (Verlag Hans Schiler, 2003); Religion, Staat und Politik im Vorderen Orient, coedited with Ferhad Ibrahim, (Lit Verlag, 2003)

Amr Hamzawy holds a Ph.D from Free University of Berlin; M.A. from the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, M.A. from the University of Amsterdam, and B.Sc. from Cairo University.

Ayelet Shachar is a professor of law, political science, and arts and science at the University of Toronto. She received her JSD from Yale Law School in 1997. Prior to that, she served as law clerk to former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak. She joined the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1999.

Shachar is the author of Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights, winner of the 2002 Best First Book Award by the American Political Science Association, Foundations of Political Theory Section. She is recipient of many academic awards and fellowships, including, most recently, Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School, the Connaught Research Fellowship in Social Sciences at the University of Toronto, and the Emile Noel Senior Fellow at NYU School of Law.

Her scholarship focuses on citizenship and immigration law, highly skilled migrants and transnational legal processes, as well as state and religion, family law, multilevel governance regimes, group rights, and gender equality.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, Stanford Humanities Center, and Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop).

Thomas Scanlon is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity. He received his BA from Princeton in 1962 and his PhD from Harvard. In between, he studied for a year at Oxford as a Fulbright Fellow. He taught at Princeton from 1966 before Harvard in 1984.

Professor Scanlon's dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, but the bulk of his teaching and writing has been in moral and political philosophy. He has published papers on freedom of expression, the nature of rights, conceptions of welfare, and theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory. His teaching has included courses on theories of justice, equality, and recent ethical theory. His book, What We Owe to Each Other, was published by Harvard University Press in 1988; a collection of papers on political theory, The Difficulty of Tolerance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Stanford Department of Political Science (Stanford Political Theory Workshop), and the Stanford Philosophy Department.

The working title of his PHD project is Democracy besides Elections: An Exploration into the Development and Causes of Respect for Civil Liberties in Latin American and Post-Communist Countries. The dissertation addresses the extent of civil liberty (freedom of: opinion and expression, assembly and association, religion, movement and residence as well as independent courts) in 20 Latin American and 28 post-communist countries. Apart from tracking the development of respect for civil liberties from the late 1970's till 2003, it also attempts to explain the present level of respect by examining different structural explanations, such as historical experience with liberty, ethno-religious composition, modernization and natural resources (primarily oil).

Skaaning has constructed his own dataset and index on civil liberties based on coding of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1977 to 2003, which he uses in his descriptive analysis of the development and as the dependent variable in the subsequent causal assessment. In this stage of the research, he both undertakes intraregional analyses, utilizing the fuzzy-set method and OLS-regression, and interregional comparisons.

Skaaning received his B.A. (2000) and M.A. (2003) in Political Science from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, where he is also a PHD scholar in the final year. Parts of his MA degree were completed at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität (Heidelberg) and Freie Universität (Berlin).