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59th Program Year - Fifth Meeting

January 7, 2008

Tanoan Country Club

The Mind of Jihad

Laurent Murawiec

Laurant Murawiec is a senior fellow with Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He was a senior international policy analyst with the RAND Corporation until 2002. His main research areas concern the application of anthropology to strategy, the "Revolution in Military Affairs", and information warfare. He has taught philosophy in Paris and was a foreign correspondent in Germany and Central Europe for La Vie Francaise, a major French business weekly. He later co-founded and managed GeoPol Services S.A., a Geneva, Switzerland, consulting company that advised multinational corporations and banks.

Prior to moving to the United States, he was an adviser to the French Ministry of Defense and taught the history of economic planning at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He has taught military analysis and cultural anthropology at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Murawiec earned his B.A., Phil. and M.A., Phil. from the Sorbonne University in Paris. He speaks fluent Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French.

Murawiec has translated Clausewitz's On War into French (Perrin, 1999), as well as works by G. von Scharnhorst. Books in English include Princes of Darkness: the Saudi Assault on the West (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), Vulnerabilities in the Chinese Way of War, a study for the Department of Defense (2004, Hudson Institute), Aristotle in Cyberspace: Toward a Theory of Information Warfare and The Mind of Jihad (2005) and Pandora's Boxes , volumes in a series investigating the theology, history and anthropology of modern jihad. A completely recast version of the two volumes will be published in 2008 by Cambridge Press as The Mind of Jihad.

A contributor to The National Interest, Middle East Quarterly, France's Le Débat, XXè siècle, revue d'historie, Politique internationale, Pour la Science, and other journals, he has written opinion pieces for the Washington Post, the Financial Times, National Review Online, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Die Welt and others. He has lectured at Columbia University and many other universities, and has appeared on Fox & Friends, BBC-TV, French, Italian, Canadian national television, LBN TV of Lebanon and Al-Jazeera, Chinese (NTD-TV) and Japanese (NHK) television networks. He has been a frequent host of conservative and Christian radios in the United States.