Ami Pedahzur is the Ralph W Yarborough Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts and a professor at the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University in Haifa, Israel where he also taught until 2004. From 2000 to 2004 he served at the University of Haifa as a Senior Fellow and Deputy Head of the National Security Studies Center.

Pedahzur arrived at the University of Texas in 2004 as a Donald D. Harrington fellow and since 2005 has served as a professor at the Department of Government. His main fields of interest are terrorism, counterterrorism, political radicalism, Israeli politics, and security studies. He serves as associate editor of the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Pedahzur’s books include Suicide Terrorism (2005), The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism (2009), Jewish Terrorism in Israel (2009, with Arie Perliger) and The Triumph of Israel’s Radical Right (2012).

Currently he is working on a new book project which is provisionally entitled Super-Soldiers: The Evolution and Proliferation of Special Forces since the Second World War.