Ian S. Lustick

Dr. Ian S. Lustick holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair (Emeritus) in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches Middle Eastern politics, comparative politics, and computer modeling. He is a recipient of awards from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Sciences Research Council. Before coming to Penn he taught for fifteen years at Dartmouth College and worked for one year in the Department of State. He served as a consultant on Middle East politics and policies for most agencies of the US government and across almost every administration since the late 1970s. His PS-I platform for agent-based modeling was used to produce theory testing and generating studies of a wide range of social science problems and was the basis for the Virtual Strategic Analysis and Forecasting Tool (V-SAFT) which supplied geopolitical forecasts and analyses to US government agencies and various foundations. His present research focuses on the implications of the disappearance of the option of a negotiated “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and techniques of counterfactual forecasting. 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. Among his books are Arabs in the Jewish State (1980); For the Land and the Lord (1988, 1994); Unsettled States, Disputed Lands (1993); Trapped in the War on Terror (2006); and Paradigm Lost (2019).