Peter Chalk, PhD

Policy Analyst
The RAND Corporation

Dr. Chalk is a policy analyst working in the Project AIR FORCE and National Security Research divisions of the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California. During the past four years, he has worked on projects examining unconventional security threats in Southeast and South Asia, new strategic challenges for the U.S. Air Force (USAF) in Latin America, evolving trends in national and international terrorism, Australian defense and foreign policy, and U.S. military links in the Asia-Pacific. He is a specialist correspondent for Jane’s Intelligence Review and regularly consults with a variety of U.S.-based risk assessment services. He was also a major contributor to the First Annual Report of the Gilmore Commission, a congressionally mandated advisory panel established to assess U.S. domestic response capabilities for terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction.

Prior to joining RAND, Dr. Chalk was an assistant professor of politics at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Strategic and Defense Studies Centre of the Australian National University, Canberra. In addition to his academic posts, Dr. Chalk has acted as a research consultant in the UK, Canada and Australia and has experience with the UK Armed Forces.

He is author of Non-Military Security and Global Disorder: The Impact of Extremism, Violence and Chaos on National and International Security (Macmillan, 2000) and West European Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: The Evolving Dynamic (Macmillan, 1996), in addition to numerous journal articles and other scholarly publications in the security studies field.

Dr. Chalk has lectured widely on terrorism, piracy, and "gray area phenomena" before government, intelligence, police and military audiences in North America, Europe, Sri Lanka, and Australia. He is currently a member of the Standing Committee of the Washington-based International Research Group on Political Violence (IRGPV) and serves as Associate Editor of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, one of the foremost international journals in the area of low intensity conflict.