Brent Durbin is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in Stanford's Public Policy Program, and a faculty affiliate at CISAC. In fall 2009, he will join the faculty of Smith College as an assistant professor in the Government Department.

Durbin is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation, which explains the policy processes governing how U.S. intelligence agencies respond to major changes in the international threat environment. More broadly, his research focuses on the micro- and macro-level organizational dynamics of national security bureaucracies. He has previously held research fellowships at CISAC, The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, and the University of Cambridge (U.K.).

In 2008, Durbin earned his PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds a BA (magna cum laude) in politics and English literature from Oberlin College, and an MPP from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Prior to attending Berkeley, Durbin served as press secretary for U.S. Senator Patty Murray, and worked as an advisor and senior staff member on several campaigns for U.S. Congress.

Frank Foley, a 2008-09 Zukerman Fellow, is a postdoctoral student in international security at CISAC. His research concerns counterterrorist policy and operations, the reform of intelligence and police agencies and the increasing role of judicial and prosecutorial actors in the field of security. His PhD dissertation, currently under revision for publication, is a comparative analysis of British and French counterterrorist policies, which argues that western states’ different institutional characteristics and norms in the field of security are shaping their responses to Islamist terrorism, leading to divergent approaches to a common problem. At CISAC, Frank is analyzing the co-ordination of counterterrorist agencies within the United States, France and Britain, drawing on organization theory to explain why some countries achieve higher levels of inter-agency co-operation than others. He has also written on European Union security policy and on terrorism and community conflict in Northern Ireland. Upcoming projects include a review of the terrorism and counterterrorism literature for the International Studies Association’s Compendium Project and an analysis of the forces shaping international co-operation on counterterrorism at both the diplomatic and operational levels. 

Frank received his PhD from the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and is a graduate of the University of Cambridge (MPhil) and University College Cork (BA, MA). He worked as a journalist in Brussels and as a researcher in Northern Ireland between 2001 and 2004.

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Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is on sabbatical in 2008-09. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as a special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. He has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989), The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons(Princeton University Press, 1993), and with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (W.W. Norton, 2002). He is the co-editor of Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James L. Wirtz, Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000). Sagan was the recipient of Stanford University's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and the 1998 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. As part of CISAC's mission of training the next generation of security specialists he and Stephen Stedman founded Stanford's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies in 2000.

His recent articles include "How to Keep the Bomb From Iran," in Foreign Affairs (September-October 2006); "The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969" co-written by Jeremi Suri and published in International Security in spring 2003; and "The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Will More Nuclear Security Forces Produce More Nuclear Security?" published in Risk Analysis in 2004. The first piece warns against "proliferation fatalism" and "deterrence optimism" to argue that the United States should work to prevent Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons by addressing the security concerns that are likely motivators for Iran's nuclear ambitions. The International Security piece looks into the events surrounding a secret nuclear alert ordered by President Nixon to determine how effective the alert was at achieving the president's goal of forcing negotiations for the end of the Vietnam War. It also questions many of the assumptions made about nuclear signaling and discusses the dangers of new nuclear powers using this technique. Sagan's article on redundancy in Risk Analysis won Columbia University's Institute for War and Peace Studies 2003 Best Paper in Political Violence prize. In this article, Sagan looks at how we should think about nuclear security and the emerging terrorist threat, specifically whether more nuclear facility security personnel increases our safety. His article, "Realism, Ethics, and Weapons of Mass Destruction" appears in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives, edited by Sohail Hashmi and Steven Lee. In addition to these works, Sagan is also finishing a collection of essays for a book tentatively entitled Inside Nuclear South Asia.

Gareth Evans has been since January 2000 President and Chief Executive of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (Crisis Group), the independent global non-governmental organisation with nearly 140 full-time staff on five continents which works, through field-based analysis and high-level policy advocacy, to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. Born in 1944, he went to Melbourne High School, and holds first class honours degrees in Law from Melbourne University (BA, LLB (Hons)) and in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University (MA). Evans was one of Australia's longest serving Foreign Ministers, best known internationally for his roles in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, bringing to a conclusion the international Chemical Weapons Convention, founding the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), and initiating the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

He was Australian Humanist of the Year in 1990, won the ANZAC Peace Prize in 1994 for his work on Cambodia, was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2001, and was awarded Honorary Doctorates of Laws by Melbourne University in 2002 and Carleton University in 2005. In 2000-2001 he was co-chair, with Mohamed Sahnoun, of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), appointed by the Government of Canada, which published its report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001. He was a member of the of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, whose report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility was published in December 2004; the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction sponsored by Sweden and chaired by Hans Blix which reported in June 2006;  the International Task Force on Global Public Goods, sponsored by Sweden and France and chaired by Ernesto Zedillo, which reported in September 2006, and the Independent Commission on the Role of the IAEA to 2020 and Beyond, which reported in May 2008. In June 2008 he was appointed to co-chair (with former Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi) the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. He had previously served as a member of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, co-chaired by Cyrus Vance and David Hamburg (1994-97), and is currently a member of the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Committee on Genocide. 

Michael May is Professor Emeritus (Research) in the Stanford University School of Engineering and a senior fellow with the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He is the former co-director of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, having served seven years in that capacity through January 2000. May is a director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked from 1952 to 1988, with some brief periods away from the Laboratory. While there, he held a variety of research and development positions, serving as director of the Laboratory from 1965 to 1971. May was a technical adviser to the Threshold Test Ban Treaty negotiating team; a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; and at various times has been a member of the Defense Science Board, the General Advisory Committee to the AEC, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation Board of Trustees, and the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. May received the Distinguished Public Service and Distinguished Civilian Service Medals from the Department of Defense, and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award from the Atomic Energy Commission, as well as other awards. His current research interests are in the area of nuclear and terrorism, energy, security and environment, and the relation of nuclear weapons and foreign policy. 

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Long-term demand for nuclear fuel is high as demonstrated by the continued rise in activities such as uranium mining and milling, enrichment, and fuel fabrication. At a recent international conference in Beijing on nuclear energy, IAEA officials stated that the global financial crisis is unlikely to deter the increasing long-term demand for new nuclear power plants. In order to limit the proliferation risk, the IAEA suggested the concept of multinational nuclear arrangements and member countries followed up with various related proposals. A few projects at the front-end of the nuclear fuel cycle are reviewed in the context of such multinational arrangements. Policies of two uranium-producing countries, Mongolia (a new supplier) and Kazakhstan (a relatively new supplier) are compared. The development at the front end of the nuclear fuel cycle is reviewed in the context of collaboration of supplier countries and countries with strong technological capability and demand such as Russia, France, China, Japan, and India. 

Undraa Agvaanluvsan is a visiting professor at CISAC. Her research covers the technical and policy aspects of the uranium and nuclear energy industry. Mongolia, her homeland, has a large reserve of natural uranium that it wants to develop for economic and strategic purposes. Similar to other developing nations, Mongolia also is considering nuclear power to help reduce domestic pollution and meet growing demand for electricity. In this context, Agvaanluvsan is analyzing Mongolia's uranium mining and processing policies to compare this emerging industry with parallel developments in Kazakhstan and countries in southern Africa. She also is comparing Mongolia's potential role as a uranium supplier to that of Canada's and Australia's.

Agvaanluvsan received her bachelor's (1994) and master's (1995) degrees in physics from the National University of Mongolia. From 1996-97, she studied high energy physics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Agvaanluvsan earned her doctorate in 2002 from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, studying nuclear reactions and quantum chaos in nuclei. Following completion of her doctorate, she conducted postdoctoral research work in the Nuclear Experimental Physics group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In addition to Agvannluvsan's scientific and policy analysis work, in 2008 she served as an adviser to Mongolia's Minister of Foreign Affairs. Agvaanluvsan also is director of the recently established Mongolian-American (MonAme) Scientific Research Center in Ulaanbaatar, which focuses on energy, the environment and mineral processing technologies. In September 2008, she helped organize MonAme's first international meeting, the "Ulaanbaatar Conference on Nuclear Physics and Applications," in Mongolia's capital.

For more than three months now the French academic world has been shaken by an unprecedented crisis with many demonstrations, action days, alternative teaching and protest initiatives of all sorts. A very specific feature of this movement is that it encompasses the whole political spectrum. In almost daily demonstrations, law professors, traditional support of right wing governments, and social sciences scholars, the leftist part of the French academic scene, were marching hands in hands. What are the reasons for such upheaval? What is under threat? What is called for? Beyond the analysis of the causes and goals of these actions, the talk will focus on the deep transformations in culture and education that are affecting French modern society.

Synopsis

To Prof. Canto-Sperber, the recent protests to university reform in France represent an unprecedented crisis in the French academic world encompassing the whole political spectrum. She sees the two most immediate causes as the reforms President Sarkozy has tried to pass. The first one would give more autonomy to the universities to regulate their professors in terms of time management and promotion. However, Prof. Canto-Sperber reveals that this comes into conflict with the fact that French academics believe that only a national body has the legitimacy to decide on the best balance between research and teaching, as well as the promotion of professors. In addition, Prof. Canto-Sperber explains it is commonly assumed in the French academic world that only a body of professors of the same academic discipline is entitled to judge the performance of a particular professor. The second reform involves a shift in the training of professors by introducing professional exams and taking away from the current system of aggregation, an achievement that mainly exhibits intellectual status. Prof. Canto-Sperber focuses on the fact that the proposition of such professional exams was seen to strike at the pride and identity of professional teaching. Moreover, to Prof. Canto-Sperber, such exams were also seen as a threat to the quality of the professors and as lowering the knowledge requirements for becoming a professor. In addition to this, Prof. Canto-Sperber also focuses on changing social realities in the French education system where some of the students do not even speak French. Professors want to maintain high intellectual status without having to come to terms with the necessity for professional training, the system of aggregation is a way to hold on to their beliefs.

In order to properly understand to significance of recent events, Prof. Canto-Sperber sets out to put them in historical context. She explains the history of the university system in France, as well as the rise and domination of the Grandes Ecoles over the universities. She argues that as French universities have all been state dependent and equal in status, they have had no incentive to attract students and have gradually become isolated from French society. They have not had to deal with the necessities of most social organizations such as efficiency, responsibility, and self-regulation. To Prof. Canto-Sperber, that is why at this stage it is difficult for universities to fathom organizing and regulating themselves. Prof. Canto-Sperber reinforces this by making the point that from the 15th century through to the 19th century, French universities repeatedly ignored the development of new knowledge such as the Cartesian revolution or the Enlightenment. This led to a habit in France of creating parallel institutions to deal with the necessity of having platforms to discuss these new intellectual approaches. Prof. Canto-Sperber puts forward the view that the reason the renewal of universities in France has been so difficult is that it means reintegration with a society that has moved on culturally and scientifically.

What Prof. Canto-Sperber therefore expresses is that there is no longer a choice but to put universities back into society and give them autonomy. Professors must be allowed to maintain their ‘republican’ ideals but in a more modest way. Prof. Canto-Sperber argues that the program of rational emancipation has led to segregation and must be abandoned. Finally and most importantly, universities must be given financial autonomy to define and regulate themselves. However, Prof. Canto-Sperber concludes by arguing that due to intellectual and philosophical barriers, the “awkward” situation will most probably continue.

In a spirited and lengthy discussion session, one of the points raised was that of bringing together research and teaching. Discussion of this also led to the point of the problem of donations in French universities and these universities' dependence on the state.

About the Speaker

Monique Canto-Sperber is the director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, rue d'Ulm), she is a university professor and a fellow of National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, Center Raymond Aron), she was the former vice president of the French National Ethics Committee.

Alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, with an aggregation and a doctorate in philosophy, she was professor at several universities (University of Rouen and Amiens). She chaired a research center (at University of Caen) and in 1993 was appointed director of research at the CNRS. She was the scientific director of many international scientific conferences. She taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and at many other universities abroad. She was a visiting professor at Stanford University.

Monique Canto-Sperber sat on numerous boards and committees. She was a member of the board of trustees of the French National Library, and she chaired the Philosophy Committee of the National Center of Letters. She is the editor of two series edited at the Presses Universitaires de France. She takes part in a television program on essays and debates in the Senate channel, Public Sénat, and runs a radio weekly program on France Culture.

Monique Canto-Sperber was trained as a classicist and first worked in the field of ancient philosophy. She published four translations and commentaries of Plato's dialogues and several books on Greek philosophy: Les Paradoxes de la connaissance (1991), Philosophie grecque (1997) et Ethiques Grecques (2002).

For more than fifteen years, most of her books have been devoted to contemporary moral and political philosophy and to practical ethical questions. She published numerous books on these issues, translated into several languages, among them La Philosophie morale britannique (1994), le Dictionnaire d'Ethique et de philosophie morale (1996, 4ème édition : 2004), L'Inquiétude morale et la vie humaine (2001, Englis trans, 2008)), Les Règles de la liberté (2003), Le Bien, la guerre et la terreur (2005), Faut-il sauver le libéralisme? (2006), Naissance et liberté (2008). She was the editor of several books as Le Style de la pensée (2002), and Ethiques d'aujourd'hui (2004).

Monique Canto-Sperber is Chevalier des arts et des lettres, Chevalier de la légion d'honneur and Officier de l'ordre national du mérite.

Jennifer Pitts is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, 2005) and editor and translator of Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery (Johns Hopkins, 2001). She is currently writing a book, tentatively entitled Boundaries of the International, which explores European debates about legal relations with extra-European societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The republican tradition continues to frame French debates on empire, as it has done since the Revolution. French republicanism and Anglophone liberalism have shared numerous features in relation to empire: both are egalitarian traditions of moral universalism, and both uphold an ideal of political emancipation that has tended to entail assimilation to a European political model. This paper explores the course of French debates over empire from the period of Napoleon through the July Monarchy — the broader context for the thought of the iconic liberal republicans Constant and Tocqueville — with particular attention to the ways in which liberal and republican registers were deployed in both support and critique of empire, and to how the articulation of liberal and republican agendas in France was affected by the Algeria conquest. It also discusses the first Algerian contribution to French public deliberation about the conquest, Hamdan Khodja’s 1833 text Le Miroir, a work that self-consciously inhabited both a liberal cosmopolitan and a Muslim perspective and that was nearly alone in French debates in making a principled argument for Algerian