Featured Fellows: Thomas Hegghammer and Maya Tudor

Thomas Hegghammer: Research Fellow,Initiative on Religion in International Affairs/International Security Program

As a high school student in Narvik, Norway, Thomas Hegghammer became fascinated with classical travel accounts from Egypt. This interest led him to an undergraduate degree in Egyptology and Classical Hebrew and months of traveling in Egypt and Israel to explore archaeological sites and decipher hieroglyphs. As he traveled, he discovered an interest in the region's contemporary politics, so went on to earn a master's degree in Modern Middle East Studies.

Hegghammer's research interest is militant Islamism and the early history of the jihadi movement. At the Belfer Center, he is writing a book about the Islamist ideologue Abdallah Azzam and the Arab mobilization to 1980s Afghanistan.

"The Afghan jihad," Hegghammer says, "marked the beginning of the internationalization of jihad that ultimately produced 9/11. However, we don't know why the Arabs went there in the first place. The answer, I argue, is in the rise of what I call the ‘pan-Islamist movement,' a loose cluster of organizations and charities working to promote inter-Muslim solidarity from the early 1970s onward."

Hegghammer will spend next academic year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Maya Tudor: Research Fellow, International Security Program/Intrastate Conflict Program

Backpacking her way through India and Pakistan after college, Maya Tudor, a research fellow with the Center's International Security Program and Intrastate Conflict Program, was struck by the sense that while differences exist, India and Pakistan share much more in common-from languages and cuisines to widespread poverty and colonial histories-than not. And yet, their political systems appeared radically different.

"When I enrolled in a doctorate program in politics years later, these travel musings motivated my core research question, namely why India was able to create a stable democratic regime while Pakistan was not," Tudor says. "My dissertation," she says, "suggests that two factors-the classes dominating the respective independence movements and the kinds of political parties these classes created-critically explain the initial establishment of a stable democracy in India and an unstable autocracy in Pakistan."

"Going forward, I hope to disseminate my research in an organization directly informing public policy," Tudor says. "After all, the point of scholarship is not just to better understand the world, but also to help change it."

Tudor moves on to a post-doctoral fellowship in June at the Centre for the Study of Inequality and Democracy in Oxford University's Department of Politics and International Relations.