Eli Berman

One day I gave a briefing at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa and got a peek at the bookshelves of the architects of counterterrorism / counterinsurgency strategy. That hurt. They were reading the same journalistic material as the general public, and almost none of the scholarly journals me and my colleagues were publishing in. The officers were smart, well-educated, motivated, pragmatic men and women, working tirelessly to win. And they were way out of touch with what the research community had discovered since 9/11 about terrorism. Suddenly I understood why we disagreed about policy: why the military was overly focused on targeting the enemy, and confused about how to improve governance. On the plane home I determined to write a book that would lay out the "club model" research in a form accessible to nonacademics.

What did I see that they didn't? Well, in the tense days after 9/11 I discovered my unique position: I'd trained in counterinsurgency just like the CENTCOM officers, but as an academic had also spent years studying the internal economies of radicals religious communities. Besides, as a tenured professor I had license to read and write about whatever I liked. So I did what economists do: read, distilled, modeled and looked for data to test the models on. Eventually I decided that the key question was what made religious radicals such lethal terrorists, dismissed the conventional wisdom, and plumbed the sociology of religion for a different answer --one rooted not in theology but in the resilience of radical religious communities as organizations. To give away more would ruin the book.

To keep this material fresh I'm experimenting with twittering a real time annotated bibliography. Anyone can follow at twitter.com by searching "clubmodel".

I'm an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California San Diego -where my colleagues are very patient with a research agenda that's pretty exotic for an economist. I'm also Research Director for International Security Studies at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation., where my colleagues from the ten UC campuses are wonderfully tolerant of a rogue economist.

When I'm not thinking about religion and violence my wife and I raise teenagers in Southern California. We also enjoy walking the dog in the glorious sunshine.