The biographies of our 2023 distinguished featured guests appear below. We invite you to learn more about them.

INVITED AUTHORS AND SPEAKERS

Dan Ciuriak is Director and Principal, Ciuriak Consulting Inc. (Ottawa), Senior Fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (Waterloo), Fellow-in-Residence with the C.D. Howe Institute (Toronto), Distinguished Fellow with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada (Vancouver), and Associate with BKP Economic Advisors GmbH (Munich). Previously, he had a 31-year career with Canada’s civil service, retiring as Deputy Chief Economist at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT, now Global Affairs Canada) where he was responsible for economic analysis in support of trade negotiations and trade litigation and served as contributing editor of DFAIT’s Trade Policy Research series (2001-2007 & 2010 editions).  He has written extensively on international trade and finance, innovation and industrial policy, and economic development, with particular focus on the digital transformation and the economic and technological roots of great power conflict.

Ali (Al) G. Dizboni (Ph.D., MA, l’Université de Montréal) is an Associate Professor and the Chair of MSS (Military and Strategic Studies Programme) at the Department of Political Science and Economics at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is also an  Associate Fellow with leading research centers such as CIDP (Queens’ University). His current research include the Formation of Wahhabi State in Saudi Arabia, the genesis of Ballistic Missiles in Middle East (three case studies) and Right Wing Radicalization in selected NATO Armed forces. Examples of his publications include: in collaboration, A Hermeneutic Analysis of Military Operations in Afghanistan, Palgrave-Macmillan; in collaboration “Future Trends of Canadian Military Operations in Middle East”, , McGill & Queen’s University Press; journal paper “La République islamique et le fait minoritaire” Diplomatie; book chapter in collaboration “The Terrorist Resourcing Model applied to Canada”, Journal of Money Laundering ; book chapter in collaboration, on Framing, Branding and Explaining: A Survey of Perception of Islam and Muslims in Canadian polls, Government, and Academia, Oxford University Press; Book chapter in collaboration on Instruments and Arrangements Against Online Terrorism Relating To International Cooperation, with Taylor & Francis Publisher.  His latest publication in collaboration  is with Parameters Journal on Developing Strategic Lieutenants in the Canadian Army (2022) He is an occasional commentator for the French, English/Persian media on different aspects of Middle East/Iranian politics and the Canadian Foreign policy in the region. Dr Dizboni is fluent in four languages English, French, Persian and Arabic.

Saeid Golkar is a UC Foundation assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. He is also a nonresident senior fellow on Middle East policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in the United Kingdom. Golkar is the author of a book on the Basij, the paramilitary militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, titled Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Iran (Columbia University Press, 2015), which was awarded the Washington Institute silver medal prize.

Valentine M. Moghadam is Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, and former director of the International Affairs Program, at Northeastern University, Boston. Born in Tehran, Iran, Prof. Moghadam studied in Canada and the U.S.  In addition to her academic career, Prof. Moghadam has twice been a UN staff member (UNU/WIDER, Helsinki, Finland, 1990-1995; and at UNESCO, Paris, 2004-2006). Her many publications include Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (1993; 2003; 2013), Globalization and Social Movements: The Populist Challenge and Democratic Alternatives (2020), and After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa (2021, with Shamiran Mako). In Fall 2021, Prof. Moghadam was the Kluge Chair, Countries and Cultures of the South, at the U.S. Library of Congress, working on a project entitled “Varieties of Feminism in the Middle East and North Africa.”  A recent publication, co-authored with two Kurdistan-based Iranian sociologists, is "Women in Iranian Kurdistan: Patriarchy and the Quest for Empowerment”, Gender & Society, vol. 35, no. 4 (Aug. 2021): 616-642.

Richard A. Moss is an associate professor in the Russian Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College's Center for Naval Warfare Studies. His current research projects focus on the maritime dimension of Russia’s Syria intervention. He also specializes in the U.S.-Soviet relationship during the Cold War and is an expert on the Nixon presidential recordings. Professor Moss previously served as a government and contract military capabilities analyst with the Department of Defense and as an historian with the Department of State. The University Press of Kentucky published his book, “Nixon's Back Channel to Moscow: Confidential Diplomacy and Detente” in January 2017.

Jeremy Pressman studies international relations, protests, the Arab/Israeli conflict, and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. He co-founded and co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, an event counting project that has tallied and made publicly available data on all manner of protests in the United States since 2017. Pressman received his PhD in political science from MIT and previously worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, Brandeis University, the University of Sydney, the UConn Humanities Institute, and the Norwegian Nobel Institute where he was a Fulbright fellow.

His most recent book is The sword is not enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the limits of military force (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020). Pressman questions the over-reliance on military force and highlights the negative military and political consequences such as greater insecurity. Pressman has spoken at length about the book in settings ranging from an academic talk at UCLA (video) to podcasts such as “In the Moment” (Town Hall Seattle) and “Power Problems” (CATO Institute).

Pressman has written two other books:  Warring Friends: Alliance Restraint in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), a part of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs; and, with Geoffrey Kemp, Point of No Return: The Deadly Struggle for Middle East Peace (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997). He has published journal articles in Cooperation & Conflict, Diplomatic History, International Security, Perspectives on Politics, Science Advances, Social Movement Studies, and elsewhere (journal articles). See E-IR for a 2020 interview with Pressman on his career and publications.

Nicholas Roberts is a historian of the modern Middle East and Islamic world. He is Assistant Professor of History at Norwich University and, for academic year 2022-2023, the inaugural W. Nathaniel Howell Postdoctoral Fellow in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. Dr. Roberts earned his doctorate in history from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a Presidential Fellow and a research fellow with the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. Before, he earned a Master of Arts in history from Georgetown University.

His current book project, A Sea of Wealth: Sayyid Sa‘id bin Sultan, His Omani Empire, and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace, draws upon research in a dozen archives across four continents. This book uses the reign of Oman’s longest serving ruler as a lens for highlighting the Omani Empire’s formative role inuniting the Atlantic and Indian oceans into a shared oceanic marketplace, a crucial step in modern global capitalism’s rise.

Dr. Guy Ziv is an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service (SIS), where he teaches courses on U.S. foreign policy, international negotiations, U.S.-Israel relations, and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. He is the recipient of the SIS Outstanding Teaching Award in 2014 and the William Cromwell Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2019. Dr. Ziv’s first book, Why Hawks Become Doves: Shimon Peres and Foreign Policy Change in Israel, was published by SUNY Press in 2014, with an updated paperback version published in 2015. His current research project focuses on civil-military relations in Israel. Dr. Ziv has a background in policy, having worked on Capitol Hill and for Israel Policy Forum, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan organization that promotes American efforts aimed at resolving the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. His articles have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, blogs, and major newspapers and news sites, such as The Baltimore Sun, CNN.com, Haaretz, The Hill, The Jerusalem Post, New York Daily News, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today. He also appears regularly as a commentator in leading media outlets including BBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, i24 News, Sky News, and Voice of America.

Dr. Diane M. Zorri is an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the National Defense College of the United Arab Emirates. She also serves as a non-resident Senior Fellow and Presidential Advisory Board member at Joint Special Operations University, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida. Previous to NDC, Dr. Zorri taught at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida and John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. Dr. Zorri earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from George Mason University in 2015; her dissertation focused on Iraqi political alignments and alliances after the fall of the Ba'ath party. Today, her major research interests are Gulf politics, U.S. foreign policy, defense strategy, and maritime cybersecurity.

Prior to her work in academia, Diane served as an officer in the United States Air Force and worked in the aerospace and defense industry. Upon leaving the Air Force, Diane worked for an Italian-U.S. defense company managing projects in foreign military sales, integrated communications, and physical security. During the Iraq war, she worked for Multi-National Force-Iraq in Baghdad, managing over 400 bilingual, bicultural advisors to the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Defense. She has also done business consulting for European, South American, and Middle Eastern clients interested in security and defense procurement. Diane is also a 2001 graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and a 2006 graduate of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Return to 2023 Summit Page

Summit Highlights

The Peace and War Summit at Norwich University, America’s oldest private military college and birthplace of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), examines significant international issues with an eye at recommending viable solutions. The inaugural summit, a two-day event in September 2018, addressed North Korea’s nuclear and missile challenges. 

September 17-18, 2018
Mack Hall, Norwich University

The Inaugural Peace and War Summit addressed critical global issues from an integrated policy and scholarly perspective. The central theme of the 2018 summit was the North Korean nuclear/missile issue, a matter of critical importance for peace and stability in the United States and the East Asian region.

VIEW THE PROGRAM

CONTACT
Yangmo Ku, Executive Director
Associate Professor, Political Science, Norwich University
Associate Director, John and Mary Frances Patton Peace & War Center

Keep the conversations flowing. Join The Norwich University Peace & War Center on Facebook.