The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Political Science,
#51
Fareed Zakaria
#792
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Fareed Rafiq Zakaria is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.
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Gabriel Almond
#2069
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Gabriel Abraham Almond was an American political scientist best known for his pioneering work on comparative politics, political development, and political culture. Biography Almond was born on January 12, 1911, in Rock Island, Illinois, the son of Russian-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, raised "in a strict orthodox Jewish home." He attended the University of Chicago, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and worked with Harold Lasswell. Almond completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1938, but his doctoral dissertation, Plutocracy and Politics in New York City, was not published until 1998, because it included unflattering references to John D.
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Aleksandr Dugin
#573
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin is a Russian far-right political philosopher. Born into a military intelligence family, Dugin was an anti-communist dissident during the 1980s. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dugin co-founded the National Bolshevik Party with Eduard Limonov, a party which espoused National Bolshevism, which he later left. In 1997, he published Foundations of Geopolitics, in which he outlined his worldview, calling for Russia to rebuild its influence through alliances and conquest, and to challenge the rival Atlanticist empire led by the United States. Dugin continued ...
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James Clapper
#830
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James Robert Clapper Jr. is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and former Director of National Intelligence. Clapper has held several key positions within the United States Intelligence Community. He served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1992 until 1995. He was the first director of defense intelligence within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and simultaneously the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. He served as the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from September 2001 until June 2006.
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Jose Maria Sison
#1814
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Jose Maria Canlas Sison , also known by his nickname Joma, was a Filipino writer, poet and activist who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines and added elements of Maoism to its philosophy – which would be known as national democracy. He applied the theory of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to the history and current circumstances of the Philippines.
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Roger Stone
#601
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Roger Jason Stone is an American conservative political consultant, lobbyist, and felon. Stone is most remembered for the Robert Mueller special council investigation, and his involvement with and connections to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a political consultant for the campaign of 45th U.S. president Donald Trump.
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Rudolph Rummel
#1395
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Rudolph Joseph Rummel was an American political scientist and professor at the Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. Contrasting genocide, Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government, such as the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonialism, Nazi Germany, the Stalinist purges, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, and other authoritarian, totalitarian, or undemocratic regimes, coming to the conclusion that democratic regimes...
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James C. Scott
#1064
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
#59
Xi Jinping
#1033
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Xi Jinping is a Chinese politician who has been the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the Central Military Commission , and thus as the paramount leader of China, since 2012. Xi has also been the president of the People's Republic of China since 2013. He belongs to the fifth generation of Chinese leadership.
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Gérard Prunier
#2466
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gérard Prunier is a French academic, historian, and consultant. He specializes in African history and affairs —particularly the Horn of Africa and the African Great Lakes regions. Biography Prunier received a PhD in African History in 1981 from the University of Paris, spending a year at Harvard University and a stay in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1984, he joined the CNRS scientific institution in Paris as a researcher. He later also became Director of the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa.
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Betty Friedan
#177
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women , which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".
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Norman Finkelstein
#803
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist and activist. His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Finkelstein was born to parents who are both Jewish Holocaust survivors in New York City in 1953. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007. In 2006, the department and ...
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Graham Allison
#3274
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Graham Tillett Allison Jr. is an American political scientist and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is known for his contributions in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. His book Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection, co-written with Peter Szanton, was published in 1976 and influenced the foreign policy of the Carter administration. Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and de...
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#669
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-American activist and former politician. She is a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, opposing forced marriage, honour killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation.
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Gene Sharp
#2026
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Gene Sharp was an American political scientist. He was the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the study of nonviolent action, and professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was known for his extensive writings on nonviolent struggle, which have influenced numerous anti-government resistance movements around the world.
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Susan Rice
#1548
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Susan Elizabeth Rice is an American diplomat, policy advisor, and public official. A member of the Democratic Party, Rice served as the 22nd Director of the United States Domestic Policy Council from 2021 to 2023, as the 27th U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations from 2009 to 2013, and as the 23rd U.S. National Security Advisor from 2013 to 2017.
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Stephen Walt
#1557
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Stephen Martin Walt is an American political scientist currently serving as the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. A member of the realist school of international relations, Walt has made important contributions to the theory of neorealism and has authored the balance of threat theory. Books that he has authored or coauthored include Origins of Alliances, Revolution and War, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
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Sergei Ivanov
#807
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sergei Borisovich Ivanov is a Russian senior official and politician who has been serving as the Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation on the Issues of Environmental Activities, Ecology and Transport since 12 August 2016. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
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Arend Lijphart
#4322
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Arend d'Angremond Lijphart is a Dutch-American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, elections and voting systems, democratic institutionss, and ethnicity and politics. He is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is influential for his work on consociational democracy and his contribution to the new Institutionalism in political science.
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John Negroponte
#1938
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Dimitri Negroponte is an American diplomat. He is currently a James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is a former J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of International Affairs at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Prior to this appointment, he served as a research fellow and lecturer in international affairs at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, United States Deputy Secretary of State , and the first ever Director of National Intelligence .
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Ed Broadbent
#2428
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
John Edward "Ed" Broadbent is a Canadian social-democratic politician, political scientist, and chair of the Broadbent Institute, a policy think tank. He was leader of the New Democratic Party from 1975 to 1989. In the 2004 federal election, he returned to Parliament for an additional term as the Member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre.
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Chalmers Johnson
#2223
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
Chalmers Ashby Johnson was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean War, was a consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973 and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972. He was also president and co-founder with Steven Clemons of the Japan Policy Research Institute , an organization that promotes public education about Japan and Asia.
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Slobodan Milošević
#2260
Overall Influence
1941 - 2006 (65 years)
Slobodan Milošević was a Serbian and Yugoslav politician who was the president of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 until his оverthrow in 2000. Formerly a high-ranking member of the League of Communists of Serbia during the 1980s, he led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in 1990 until his death in 2006. Milošević played a major role in the Yugoslav Wars. During his reign, numerous anti-government and anti-war protests took place, and hundreds of thousands deserted the Milošević-controlled Yugoslav People's Army, leading to mass emigration from Serbia.
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Manfred Nowak
#3448
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Manfred Nowak is an Austrian human rights expert, who served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2004 to 2010. He is Secretary General of the Global Campus of Human Rights in Venice, Italy, Professor of International Human Rights, and Scientific Director of the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He is also co-founder and former Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights and a former judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2016, he was appointed Independent Expert leading the ...
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William H. Riker
#1798
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
William Harrison Riker was an American political scientist who is prominent for applying game theory and mathematics to political science. He helped to establish University of Rochester as a center of behavioral revolution in political science.
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John Ehrlichman
#889
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
John Daniel Ehrlichman was an American political aide who served as White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon. Ehrlichman was an important influence on Nixon's domestic policy, coaching him on issues and enlisting his support for environmental initiatives.
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Charles E. Lindblom
#5782
Overall Influence
1917 - 2018 (101 years)
Charles Edward Lindblom was an American academic who studied economics at the University of Chicago and was Sterling Professor emeritus of political science and economics at Yale University. He served as president of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Comparative Economic Studies, as well as director of Yale's Institute for Social and Policy Studies.
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Michael McFaul
#2955
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Michael Anthony McFaul is an American academic and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. McFaul is currently the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, where he is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also a Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Prior to his nomination to the ambassadorial position, McFaul worked for the U.S. National S...
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Giovanni Sartori
#2517
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Giovanni Sartori was an Italian political scientist who specialized in the study of democracy, political parties, and comparative politics. Biography Born in Florence in 1924, Sartori graduated in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Florence in 1946. He stayed on at the University of Florence, teaching History of Modern Philosophy and Doctrine of the State starting in 1946. He became a lecturer in Modern Philosophy and in Political Science , and subsequently professor of Sociology . Sartori became full professor of Political Science and taught at Florence University from 1966 ...
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John Bolton
#1111
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John Robert Bolton is an American attorney, diplomat, Republican consultant, and political commentator. He served as the 25th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and as the 26th United States National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019.
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John Roemer
#673
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
John E. Roemer is an American economist and political scientist. He is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. Before Yale, he was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis, and before entering academia Roemer worked for several years as a labor organizer. He is married to Natasha Roemer, with whom he has two daughters.
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Sean Spicer
#938
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Sean Michael Spicer is a former American political aide who served as the 30th White House Press Secretary and as White House Communications Director under President Donald Trump in 2017. Spicer was communications director of the Republican National Committee from 2011 to 2017, and its chief strategist from 2015 to 2017.
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James Meredith
#867
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
James Howard Meredith is an American civil rights activist, writer, political adviser, and United States Air Force veteran who became, in 1962, the first African-American student admitted to the racially segregated University of Mississippi after the intervention of the federal government . Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Meredith decided to exercise his constitutional rights and apply to the University of Mississippi. His goal was to put pressure on the Kennedy administration to enforce civil rights for African Americans. The admission of Meredith ignited the Ole M...
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Alexander Wendt
#1631
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Alexander Wendt is an American political scientist who is one of the core social constructivist researchers in the field of international relations, and a key contributor to quantum social science. Wendt and academics such as Nicholas Onuf, Peter J. Katzenstein, Emanuel Adler, Michael Barnett, Kathryn Sikkink, John Ruggie, Martha Finnemore, and others have, within a relatively short period, established constructivism as one of the major schools of thought in the field.
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David Horowitz
#732
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
David Joel Horowitz is an American conservative writer and activist. He is a founder and president of the right-wing David Horowitz Freedom Center ; editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine; and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. Horowitz also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.
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Robert Reich
#677
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.
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Paul Nitze
#1568
Overall Influence
1907 - 2004 (97 years)
Paul Henry Nitze was an American businessman and government official who served as United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. He is best known for being the principal author of NSC 68 and the co-founder of Team B. He helped shape U.S. Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.
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Yasser Arafat
#2188
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Yasser Arafat was a Palestinian political leader. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 to 2004 and President of the Palestinian National Authority from 1994 to 2004. Ideologically an Arab nationalist and a socialist, Arafat was a founding member of the Fatah political party, which he led from 1959 until 2004.
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Dolores Huerta
#1518
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta is an American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, is a co-founder of the United Farmworkers Association, which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers . Huerta helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965 in California and was the lead negotiator in the workers' contract that was created after the strike.
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Sidney Verba
#3123
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Sidney Verba was an American political scientist, librarian and library administrator. His academic interests were mainly American and comparative politics. He was the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University and also served Harvard as the director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007.
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Benedict Anderson
#1308
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States. Anderson is best known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, which explored the origins of nationalism. A polyglot with an interest in Southeast Asia, he was the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University. His work on the "Cornell Paper", which disputed the official story of Indonesia's 30 September Movement and the subsequent anti-Communist purges of 1965–1966, led to his expulsion from that country....
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Amin Saikal
#4466
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Professor Amin Saikal , is Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, and Founding Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies , at the Australian National University. He is also Adjunct Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Professor Saikal has specialised in the politics, history, political economy and international relations of the Middle East and Central Asia. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, Indiana University, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies , Zayed University, and visiting fellow at Cambr...
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Harvey Mansfield
#1693
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Harvey Claflin Mansfield Jr. is an American political philosopher. He was the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he taught since 1962. He has held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the National Humanities Center; he also received the National Humanities Medal in 2004 and delivered the Jefferson Lecture in 2007. He is a Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is notable for his generally conservative stance on political issues in his writings.
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Robin Morgan
#585
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robin Morgan is an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and former child actor. Since the early 1960s, she has been a key radical feminist member of the American Women's Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement. Her 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful was cited by the New York Public Library as "One of the 100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century.". She has written more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and was editor of Ms. magazine.
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Richard Perle
#1982
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Richard Norman Perle is an American political advisor who served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs under President Ronald Reagan. He began his political career as a senior staff member to Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1970s. He served on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004 where he served as chairman from 2001 to 2003 under the Bush Administration before resigning due to conflict of interests.
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Michael Barkun
#1711
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Michael Barkun is an American academic who serves as Professor Emeritus of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, specializing in political and religious extremism and the relationship between religion and violence. He has authored a number of books on the subject, including Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement , A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America , and Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11 .
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Zalmay Khalilzad
#3235
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Zalmay Mamozy Khalilzad is an American diplomat and foreign policy expert. Khalilzad was U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation from September 2018 to October 2021. Khailzad was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as United States Ambassador to the United Nations, serving in the role from 2007 to 2009. Khalilzad was the highest ranking Muslim-American in government at the time he left the position. Prior to this, Khalilzad served in the Bush administration as Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2004 to 2005 and Ambassador to Iraq from 2005 to 2007.
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Van Jones
#1411
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Anthony Kapel "Van" Jones is an American political analyst, media personality, lawyer, author, and civil rights advocate. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author, a CNN host and contributor, and an Emmy Award winner.
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Theda Skocpol
#2253
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
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J. Patrice McSherry
#5589
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joan Patrice McSherry is a professor of political science at Long Island University. She specializes in the study of Latin American politics and she wrote the book Predatory States, which detailed the United States involvement in the Operation Condor. McSherry is founding chair and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at the LIU campus. She won LIU's David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2008 and received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Political Science MA-Ph.D Program of the CUNY Graduate Center in 2009. She has been awarded several Fulbright grants , and has authored several books and coedited another.
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