Ouachita Stories

Ouachita Baptist University will host Dr. Kim Cragin as a part of the Birkett Williams lecture series on Thursday, March 4, at 7:30 p.m. in Mabee Fine Arts Center’s McBeth Recital Hall on Ouachita’s campus. Cragin’s lecture, “America’s Fight Against al-Qa'ida: Successes, Failures and the Future,” is free and open to the public.

Cragin is “a top scholar and policy analyst in the field of international terrorism,” said Dr. Danny Hays, dean of OBU’s Pruet School of Christian Studies.

Cragin is a senior policy analyst at the RAND (Research and Development) Corporation. She spent three months on Gen. David Petraeus' staff in 2008 and has conducted fieldwork in Iraq, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Egypt, Colombia, Northern Ireland, China, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution working to help improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. Cragin managed the RAND Terrorism Chronology between 2000 and 2007. Her RAND publications include Arms Trafficking and Colombia (2002), Terrorism and Development (2003), The Dynamic Terrorist Threat (2004), Dissuading Terror (2005) and Sharing the Dragon's Teeth: Terrorist Groups and the Exchange of New Technologies (2007). She has also published independent academic articles including "The Early History of al-Qa'ida" in the Historical Journal (2008) and recently co-authored the book Women as Terrorists: Mothers, Recruiters, and Martyrs (Praeger, 2009) with Sara Daly.

Cragin, who holds degrees from Oklahoma Baptist University and Duke University, attended the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University and was awarded the Boren Fellowship at Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study religious extremism. She completed her doctoral work at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom in 2008. Her dissertation was titled, "Palestinian Resistance Through the Eyes of Hamas."

Ouachita’s Birkett Williams endowed lecture series was established in 1977 through a gift from the late Birkett L. Williams, a 1910 Ouachita graduate. His generous endowment established the lectures as an opportunity to extend the concepts of a liberal arts education beyond the classroom by bringing outstanding scholars and public figures to Ouachita’s campus.

For more information, contact Dr. Danny Hays at [email protected] or (870) 245-5526.

By Meg Gosser