Professor | University of Haifa
I am a Professor at the Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Haifa. I direct four research units: the Chaikin Chair for Geo-Strategy, the Ezri Center for Iran and Gulf States Research, the Maritime Policy & Strategy Research Center, and the Wydra Division for Shipping & Ports. I also lead the MA program in Maritime Strategy.
From 2005 to 2023, I was a Professor in the Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin, where I held the Ralph W. Yarborough Centennial Professorship of Liberal Arts.
My research focuses on modern warfare and technology, terrorism and counterterrorism, political extremism, and geostrategy. I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Haifa.
Academic website: pedahzur.github.io/A.M.Pedahzur
Featured project site: pedahzur.github.io/October_7 — interactive map, infographics, and inferential statistics on special operations forces during the October 7 attack (English and Hebrew).
This account hosts a research program on the use of large language models in social science research. The repositories serve two projects: a book on the global rise of Israel's special operations forces (Oxford University Press) and a series of articles on research methods in the era of AI. Each repository demonstrates one method, end to end, with the AI workflow documented: which model, which prompts, and where a human validates the output. The pipeline is part of the argument.
Conceptualization — LLM-assisted content analysis of a contested concept. A corpus of 69 definitions of "special operations forces" (1944–2018) is coded on four dimensions, cross-tabulated by period and region, and mapped with multiple correspondence analysis. The concept behaves as a family-resemblance category; the repository proposes a Goertz-style reconceptualization.
historical-entity-tracker — Extraction and resolution of people, organizations, places, and events across a multilingual historical corpus. Claude structured outputs handle extraction; cross-document resolution proposes links with confidence scores and source quotes; a historian adjudicates in Notion. Design principle: "same place + same time" is a hypothesis, not a fact.
October_7 — A reproducible event dataset of Israeli unit deployments during the October 7 attack, with descriptive infographics, cluster-robust inference, and an interactive project website. Includes the consolidated Evolving-Paradigms materials on security studies and modern warfare.
Settlements — work in progress — A settlement-level quantitative panel combining population, voting, socio-economic, built-up-area, and geospatial data for the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The public release includes a reproducible pipeline and an interactive map; the data model and matching decisions remain under active development.
- The Triumph of Israel's Radical Right (Oxford University Press, 2012)
- Jewish Terrorism in Israel (with Arie Perliger, Columbia University Press, 2011)
- The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle against Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2010)
- 🌐 Academic Website
- 📖 ORCID
- 🐦 Twitter/X
Data and code are shared to support open, reproducible research. Reuse terms and citation guidance, where available, are documented in the relevant repository. Corrections and contributions are welcome via issues and pull requests.