Biography
David Cortrightis the Director of Policy Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and Chair of the Board of the Fourth Freedom Forum in Goshen, Indiana.
Cortright is the author or editor of fifteen books, including most recently Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Other recent works include the 2nd edition of Gandhi and Beyond: Nonviolence for a New Political Age (2009) and Uniting Against Terror: Cooperative Nonmilitary Responses to the Global Terrorist Threat (MIT Press, 2007), co-edited with George A. Lopez. Over the past decade he and Lopez have written or co-edited a series of major works on multilateral sanctions, including Smart Sanctions, Sanctions and the Search for Security, and The Sanctions Decade. Cortright is also editor of The Price of Peace: Incentives and International Conflict Prevention.
Cortright has written widely on nonviolent social change, nuclear disarmament, and the use of multilateral sanctions and incentives as tools of international peacemaking. He has provided research services to the foreign ministries of Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands and has served as consultant or adviser to agencies of the United Nations, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the International Peace Academy, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Cortright has a long history of public advocacy for disarmament and the prevention of war. As an active duty soldier during the Vietnam War he spoke against that conflict. In 1978 Cortright was named executive director of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which under his leadership grew from 4,000 to 150,000 members and became the largest disarmament organization in the United States. Cortright was actively involved in the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s. In November 2002 he helped to create Win Without War, a coalition of national organizations opposing the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Cortright is a 1968 graduate of the University of Notre Dame. In 1970 he received his M.A. from New York University. His doctoral studies were completed in 1975 at the Union Institute in residence at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C