David D. Laitin

Biosketch

David D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his BA from Swarthmore College, and then served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Somalia and Grenada. Back in the US, he received his Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley, working under the direction of Ernst Haas and Hanna Pitkin.

He has taught at UCSD (1975-87), the University of Chicago (1987-1999) and at Stanford. As a student of comparative politics, he has conducted field research in Somalia, Yorubaland (Nigeria), Catalonia (Spain), Estonia, and France, focusing on issues of language and religion, and how these cultural phenomena link nation to state. His books include Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998); Nations, States and Violence (2007); Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies (2016); and African Politics Since Independence (2019).

In collaboration with James Fearon, he has published several papers on ethnicity, ethnic cooperation, the sources of civil war. n 2016, Laitin became co-director of Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab.

Laitin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2021 Laitin was the recipient of the John Skytte Prize in Poitical Science from the Johan Skytte Foundation in Uppsala University.

Research Interests

As a political scientist, I have studied how cultural differences impact on political life. I have studied several attempts of language communities to ensure official status of their languages - the Somalis in challenging the colonial administrative system in Italian and English, the Catalans in challenging Castilian linguistic hegemony in Spain, and the Russian-speakers in challenging the nationalizing policies in post-Soviet Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan -- specifying the conditions when groups succeed. I have studied as well the conditions under which religious difference in a society becomes a matter of political competition, having done fieldwork in southwestern Nigeria where Muslims and Christians have been surprisingly tolerant of one another. These studies led me to statistical examinations of the (what turned out to be non-significant) role of ethnic, linguistic and religious difference for explaining civil war onsets, and the (significant) relationship of religious difference for suicide terrorism.