Victor Asal

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Victor Asal is a faculty member of the Political Science Department of the University at Albany, SUNY. He specializes in Comparative Politics and International Relations. His research focuses on the interaction of international relations and domestic politics, notably how this interaction influences ethnic conflict and ethnic terrorism.

[edit] Biography

Asal earned his M.A. from Hebrew University, Israel, in 1996, and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2003. His dissertation, The Political Inclusion of Minorities at Risk 1870-2000, was a broad global comparative study of the political inclusion of minorities at risk. It involved three hundred groups over a hundred-year period.

[edit] Research and teaching

In his dissertation and in conjunction with the Minorities at Risk Project, Asal has overseen several ethnic conflict coding projects. Asal’s current research expands on the work in his dissertation by looking at the impact of political discrimination on ethnic conflict and terrorism. In addition, Prof. Asal works with the Crisis and Negotiation Group in researching the impact of styles of mediation on crisis negotiation using both empirical and experimental methods.

Prof. Asal has taught courses in Comparative Politics, International Relations, ethnic conflict, democratization, negotiation and crisis management. He has worked as a negotiation trainer in a variety of settings, most notably as a trainer for army officers, and civil servants running simulations on negotiation, democracy, and domestic regimes. Asal has also, in conjunction with the ICONS Project, created simulations on varied topics, including the India-Pakistan Kashmir conflict, minority peoples in Indonesia, a U.S. Senate bill mark-up process, and war crime. Working with ICONS, Asal facilitates crisis leadership training seminars for the United States Office of Personnel Management.