David D. Laitin  David D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science in the School of Humanities and Science at Stanford University. He is an influential comparative politics scholar who has authored influential works on civil war, ethnic identity and nationalism. He is known for his application of rational choice to the study of ethnic conflict, and for bridging a gap between ethnography and rational choice. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from University of California at Berkeley, where he did his dissertation under the guidance of Ernst Haas and Hanna Pitkin.