How do ancient historical conflicts remain potent elements in the collective unconscious of a society, and later lead to sectarian or ethnic violence? The Armenian genocide in the early part of the twentieth century had its roots in centuries-old religious conflicts whose political consequences set the stage for one of the most brutal oppressions in human history. More recently, conflicts between Christians and Muslims in Somalia and Ethiopia have led to murderous civil wars. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict feeds on ethnic, religious and political divides. In the case of Serbia and Bosnia, neighbors who had once lived in harmony have been injected with the virus of warlike mythologies, which equates otherness to evil. In Rwanda, the ideology of mass murder took the form of ancient tribal identifications, with roots in human morphology. Man has been confronted with the specter of civil war from the beginnings of recorded history, when Sparta and Athens fought for hegemony in the Peloponnesian Peninsula. This early conflict, recorded by Thucydides, was a struggle of ideology (between democratic Athens and the warrior society of Sparta) as well as geography and economics. How does the intra-psychic world of the individual, characterized by its own civil wars between pleasure and repression, between socialization and individuality, between conscience (or superego) and drive (libido), set the stage for these most brutal of human conflicts? More soldiers were killed in America's Civil War than in both World Wars combined. If a conflicted individual is his own worst enemy, to what extent does the power of civil conflict derive from the degree to which it feeds on both individual and societal unrest?

Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University's Middle East Institute. He specializes in Middle Eastern history, the social and institutional history of Islamic countries, and the history of technology. His publications include The Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History, The Camel and the Wheel, Islam: The View from the Edge, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, and the forthcoming Cotton and Climate in Early Islamic Iran. He co-edited The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East, co-authored The Earth and its Peoples: A Global History, and conceived and edited The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century.

Seamus Dunn is Professor Emeritus at The University of Ulster, Coleraine, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland. Before retirement from the university he was Professor of Conflict Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of Conflict, a research centre within the university. It was established initially to carry out research studies in relation to the long-lasting conflict in Northern Ireland, but was also—inevitably—much involved with other conflicts around the world. He was also a member of the committee that founded an international research centre within the University of Ulster, called INCORE, under the auspices of the United Nations University.

John Harbeson is Professor of Political Science at City College and The Graduate Center at City University of New York. He teaches and writes in the areas of comparative politics and international relations, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. He has been a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton's Center of International Studies. Professor Harbeson completed two tours of duty with the U.S. Agency for International Development while on leave from the teaching, most recently as Regional Democracy and Governance Advisor for Eastern and Southern Africa from 1993-1995.

Susan G. Lazar is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine, George Washington University School of Medicine, and The Uniformed Services Universtiy of the Health Sciences, as well as Supervising and Training Analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. She is the co-author of A Concise Guide to Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, and has published extensively on the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy, stemming from her work as a consultant to the Clinton White House Task Force for National Health Care Reform. She is the Executive Director of the Fund for the Erevna International Peace Center, which supports the Erevna International Peace Center, an ecumenical international peace center being constructed on land donated by the Government of the Republic of Cyprus.

Avishai Margalit is George Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and recipient of the 2007 EMET Prize. He is a founder of "Peace Now," the Israeli peace movement calling for recognition of the rights of Palestinians to self-determination in their own state, alongside Israel. Dr. Margalit received the 2001 Spinoza Lens Prize, awarded by the International Spinoza Foundation for "a significant contribution to the normative debate on society." He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Buruma), which addresses currents in radical anti-Western thought in the Islamic world.

Dan Rather has covered virtually every major event in the world in the past 50 years. His resume reads like a history book, from his early local reporting in Texas on Hurricane Carla to his work covering the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; the civil rights movement; the White House and national politics; wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Yugoslavia and Iraq. From his first days as the Associated Press reporter in Huntsville, Texas, in 1950, Rather has more than earned his reputation as the "hardest working man in broadcast journalism." Mr. Rather was anchor of the CBS Evening News from 1981 to 2005 and reported for the news magazine 60 Mintues. He is now anchor and managing editor of Dan Rather Reports.