Phil Williams

Phil Williams holds the Wesley W. Posvar Chair in International Security Studies at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and is Director of the University’s Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies.  Professor Williams has published extensively in the field of international security. During the last 20 years his research has focused primarily on transnational organized crime and he has written articles on various aspects of this subject in Survival, Washington Quarterly, The Bulletin on Narcotics, Scientific American, Crime Law and Social Change, and International Peacekeeping.  In addition, Dr. Williams was founding editor of a journal entitled Transnational Organized Crime and has edited several volumes on combating organized crime, Russian organized crime, and trafficking in women.  He has been a consultant to both the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime and United States government agencies and has also given congressional testimony on organized crime. He was also a joint author for the United Nations of a study on Offshore Financial Centers and Money Laundering.  He has also focused on alliances among criminal organizations, terrorist finances, drugs and violence in Mexico, and complexity theory and intelligence analysis. In 2001 and 2002, Dr. Williams spent a sabbatical at CERT where he worked on intelligence analysis for cyber-threats and financial cyber-crime.  Dr. Williams has worked more recently on terrorist finances, ungoverned spaces, and drug trafficking through West Africa.  In academic years 2007-8 and 2008-9 he was Visiting Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute, (SSI) US Army War College, where he wrote a monograph on The New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy and another one, published in August 2009 entitled Criminals, Militias and Insurgents: Organized Crime in Iraq.  Dr. Williams contributed three chapters to Fighting Back, an edited volume on terrorism published by Stanford University Press and has published an article on Mexican drug violence in a special issue of Terrorism and Political Violence.  He also has a chapter on Nigerian organized crime in the Oxford Handbook of Organized Crime.  In addition, he is co-editor of a volume published by SSI on Cyberspace: Malevolent Actors, Criminal Opportunities, and Strategic Competition and co-author of a monograph, Military Contingencies in Megacities.  He has been researching the crisis of governance in Central America and is currently completing a book on Transnational Organized Crime.
Address: Fulton, Maryland, United States