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Monica Duffy Toft

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Monica Duffy Toft is a professor of government and public policy at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government. She previously was an associate professor of public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 2004 to 2012 and director of the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs from 2007 to 2012. She was the assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies from 1999 to 2006. Her research interests include international relations, religion, nationalism and ethnic conflict, civil and interstate wars, the relationship between demography and national security, and military and strategic planning. Duffy Toft was an associate scholar with the Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Political Science and Slavic languages and literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, summa cum laude.
Toft is the author of six books, including most recently Securing the Peace (2010), God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, with Daniel Philpott and Timothy Shah), Population Change and National Security (2012), and Rethinking Religion and World Affairs (2012, co-edited with Timothy S. Shah and Alfred C. Stepan). She is currently researching a monograph on the relationship of religion to large-scale violence, tentatively titled Faith as Reason. Toft is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Minorities at Risk Advisory Board, and in 2008 the Carnegie Foundation of New York named her a Carnegie Scholar for her research on religion and violence.
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