Former Hoover visiting fellow Samuel Helfont, a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, has published Compulsion in Religion: Sadam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq, the product of hundreds of hours of research in the Ba'ath Party archives held at Hoover. The first publication to date to be based solely on the Ba'ath Party records, Helfont's book provides a new explanation for Saddam Hussein's instrumentalizing of Islam in the 1990s and 2000s and the rise of religious insurgencies in post-2003 Iraq.
