Biography
David Cortright is president of the Fourth Freedom Forum and research fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has served as consultant or adviser to agencies of the United Nations, international think tanks, and the foreign ministries of Canada, Japan, and several European countries. He has written widely on nuclear disarmament, multilateral counter-terrorism, the use of incentives and sanctions as tools of international peacemaking, and nonviolent social change. As a soldier during the Vietnam War, Cortright joined with fellow soldiers to speak out against the war as part of the GI peace movement. In 1978 Cortright was named the executive director of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which under his direction became the largest disarmament organization in the U.S. Cortright initiated the merger of SANE and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign and served for a time as co-director of the merged organization. In 2002 Cortright helped to found the Win Without War coalition in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
He is the author or editor of 16 books, including most recently Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 2008); Uniting Against Terror: Cooperative Nonmilitary Responses to the Global Terrorist Threat (MIT Press, 2007), co-edited with George A. Lopez; and Gandhi and Beyond: Nonviolence in an Age of Terrorism (Paradigm, 2006).