Ian Lustick
Dr. Lustick is interested in comparative politics, international politics, Middle Eastern politics, and agent-based, computer assisted modeling for the social sciences. He teaches courses on Middle Eastern politics, political identities and institutions, techniques of hegemonic analysis, the expansion and contraction of states, and on relationships among complexity, evolution, and politics. Dr. Lustick is a recipient of awards from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the United States Institute of Peace. Before coming to Penn, Professor Lustick taught for fifteen years at Dartmouth College and worked for one year in the Department of State. His present research focuses the politics of Jewish and non-Jewish migration into and out of Palestine/the Land of Israel, on prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, on applications of agent-based modeling in the social sciences, techniques of disciplined counterfactual analysis, and the problem of modeling political violence. He is a past president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association and of the Association for Israel Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Dr. Lustick's "Agent-Based Identity Repertoire Model" for ABIR-28: Executable file and documentation file are available for download. Featured in Terror Games By Jeffrey Rothfeder Popular Science, March 2004 Volume 264 #3.
PS-I toolkit, Beta. For program, documentation, and source code: http://ps-i.sourceforge.net/
The model can also be found on the PS-I Agent-Based Simulation Toolkit website (Software developed in collaboration with Dr. Vladimir Dergachev).
Recent Lectures:
"Israel Needs a New Map"--Lecture Transcript from the Carnegie Endowmentment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. February 26, 2013
Research Interests:
- Comparative Politics
- International Politics
- Organization Theory
- Middle Eastern Politics
Selected Publications:
Selected Books
- Trapped in the War on Terror. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. (Buy this book from the publisher)
- For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988. (Buy this book from Amazon)
- Unsettled States, Disputed lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. (Buy this book from the publisher)
- State Building in British Ireland and French Algeria. Berkeley: University of California, 1985.
Selected Articles
- "What Counts is the Counting: Statistical Manipulation as a Solution to Israel’s 'Demographic Problem'" The Middle East Journal, Vol. 67, No. 2, Spring 2013.
- "Review of Party Competition: An Agent-Based Model." Perspectives on Politics, December 2012: 1026-1028.
- "America and the Regional Powers in a Transforming Middle East," with F. Gregory Gause, III. Middle East Policy. Vol XIX, No. 2, Summer 2012.
- "Institutional Rigidity and Evolutionary Theory: Trapped on a Local Maximum" Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History. 2 (2) 2011.
- Sergio DellaPergola, "When Scholarship Disturbs Narrative: Ian Lustick on Israel's Migration Balance," Israel Studies Review, Vol. 26, Is. 2, Winter 2011: 1-20. (A critical response to "Israel's Migration Balance: Demography, Politics, and Ideology.")
- Ian Lustick, "Leaving the Villa and Touching a Raw Nerve," Israel Studies Review, Vol. 26, Is. 2, Winter 2011: 21-27. (A response to DellaPergola's critique.)
- "Israel's Migration Balance: Demography, Politics, and Ideology," Israel Studies Review, Vol. 26, Is. 1, Summer 2011: 33-65.
- "Tetlock and Counterfactuals: Saving Methodological Ambition from Empirical Findings," Critical Review, 22: 4, 427-447.
- "Secession of the Center: A Virtual Probe of the Prospects for Punjabi Secessionism in Pakistan and the Secession of Punjabistan," Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Vol 14, No. 1, January 2011.
- "Taking Evolution Seriously: Evolutionary Theory and Historical Institutionalism," Polity, January 2011.
- Review of books on Arabs in Israel by Yitzhak Reiter and Ra'anan Cohen, Middle East Journal, Winter 2010.
- "Abstractions, Ensembles, and Virtualizations: Simplicity and Complexity in Agent-Based Modeling." Comparative Politics, January 2009. Vol. 41, no. 2. (with Dan Miodownik)
- "Abandoning the Iron Wall: Israel and the Middle Eastern 'Muck,'" Middle East Policy, September 2008.
- "Israel's Future: The Time Factor. A Debate between Efraim Inbar and Ian S. Lustick," Israel Studies Forum, Volume 23, Issue 1, Summer 2008: 3-11.
- "Fractured Fairy Tale: The War on Terror and the Emperor's New Clothes," Homeland Security Affairs III, no. 1, February 2007.
- "Negotiating Truth: The Holocaust, Lehavdil, and al-Nakba," Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 60, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2006) pp. 51-80.
- "Defining Violence: A Plausibility Probe Using Agent-Based Modeling," Paper prepared for LiCEP, Princeton University, May12-14, 2006
- "Secessionism in Multicultural States: Does Sharing Power Prevent or Encourage It?" Co-authored with Dan Miodownik and Roy J. Eidelson. American Political Science Review. Vol. 98, No. 2. May 2004, pp. 209-229.
- "Yerushalayim, al-Quds and the Wizard of Oz: Facing the Problem of Jerusalem after Camp David II and the al-Aqsa Intifada." The Journal of Israeli History, Vol.23, No.2, Autumn 2004, pp. 200–215.
- "Through Blood and Fire Shall Peace Arise." Tikkun, Vol. 17, No. 3., pp. 13-19.
- “Israeli History: Who is Fabricating What?” (Review of Fabricating Israeli History: The 'New Historians' by Efraim Karsh), Survival, Autumn 1997, pp. 156-166.
- (Read Efraim Karsh's response to the review)
- "Has Israel Annexed East Jerusalem?" Middle East Policy (January 1997)
- "Hegemonic Beliefs and Territorial Rights." International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Vol. 20 (1996), pp. 1-14.
- "Fundamentalism, Politicized Religion and Pietism" MESA Bulletin, 30. (1996)
- "To Build and to Be Built By: Israel and the Hidden Logic of the Iron Wall," Israel Studies, Vol. I, No. 1, 1996, pp. 196-223.
- "State-Building Failure in British Ireland and French Algeria," Berkeley Institute of International Studies, 1985.
Selected Chapters in Edited Volumes
- "Deploying Constructivism for the Analysis of Rare Events: How Possible is the Emergence of 'Punjabistan'?" in Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics, Kanchan Chandra, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) pp. 422-451.
- "Yerushalayim, al-Quds, and the Wizard of Oz: The Problem of Jerusalem after Camp David II and the Aqsa Intifada," in Jerusalem: Idea and Reality, Tamar Mayer and Suleiman A. Mourad, eds. London: Routledge, 2008. pp. 283-302.
- "The War on Terror: When the Response is the Catastrophe," in Emergency Management in Higher Education: Current Practices and Conversations, Jessica A. Hubbard, ed. Fairfax, VA: The Public Entity Risk Institute, 2008. pp. 73-98. (Read this as a conference paper presented at the Emergency Management Higher Education Conference, Emergency Management Institute, June 4-7, 2007)
- "Hegemony and the Riddle of Nationalism: The Dialectics of Political Identity in the Middle East" Ethnic Conflict and International Politics in the Middle East, Leonard Binder, ed. Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999. pp.332-359. (Read this chapter as a working paper) (Read it as published in Logos, Summer 2002, Vol 1, #3.)
Courses Taught:
- Political Identities and Political Institutions (Graduate Seminar)
- Hegemonic Analysis (Graduate Seminar)
- Politics, Complexity, and Evolution (Undergraduate-Graduate Seminar)
- International Relations of the Middle East: The Arab-Israeli Conflict (undergraduate)
- International Relations of the Middle East: The Dynamics of Great Power Intervention (undergraduate)
- Comparative Politics of the Middle East: Israel and Iran (undergraduate)
- Introduction to Comparative Politics (undergraduate)
