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  • Should citizens be required to serve their country by fighting for it?
  • Do we think differently about the decision to go to war when only a small number of citizens will fight it?
  • Do volunteer armies and draft armies fight differently in combat?

This panel discussion focuses on the draft versus the volunteer army in the U.S. Our distinguished panelists examine "who should fight" in a democracy, focusing on the ethical dimension of a state's system of military service.


Panelists are:

David Kennedy (History, Emeritus, Stanford). Kennedy's scholarly focus is on the integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. A prolific historian, he won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in History for Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, which recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and was a 1981 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in History for Over Here: The First World War and American Society, which uses the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system.

Eliot Cohen (Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies). Cohen's work focuses on diplomacy, international relations, irregular warfare, military history, military power and strategy, as well as strategic and security issues. He has served as Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the Secretary of Defense, and a member of the Defense Policy Board. He also directed the U.S. Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey.

Jean Bethke Elshtain (Social and Political Ethics, Divinity School, The University of Chicago). Regularly named as one of America's foremost public intellectuals, Elshtain writes frequently for journals of civic opinion and lectures widely in the United States and abroad on themes of democracy, ethical dilemmas, religion and politics, and international relations. Elshtain has authored many books including Women and War; Democracy on Trial (a New York Times' notable book for 1995); and Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (named one of the best nonfiction books of 2003 by Publishers Weekly.

Oak Lounge

David Kennedy History, Emeritus Speaker Stanford
Eliot Cohen Strategic Studies Speaker Johns Hopkins
Jean Bethke Elshtain Social and Political Ethics Speaker University of Chicago Divinity School

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Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-2715 (650) 723-0089
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The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education  
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.

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: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of DaedalusEthics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).

Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).

In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.     

Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Scott D. Sagan (Moderator) Political Science Moderator Stanford
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Richard Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-three books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in History; Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race; and The Twilight of the Bomb (Aug 2010). Rhodes has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation Program in International Peace and Security and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

In addition, Rhodes has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT and a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television's Frontline and American Experience series. He is also an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford.

Annenberg Auditorium

Richard Rhodes Author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb Speaker
Seminars
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Susie Linfield is author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press). She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University, where she is an associate professor of journalism. Her articles and essays on politics and culture have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Washington Post Book World, the New York Times, Dissent, the Nation, Guernica, Bookforum, Salmagundi, and the Boston Review. For six years she was a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and she was formerly an editor at American Film, the Village Voice, and the Washington Post.

Bldg 320 Room 105

Susie Linfield Director of Cultural Reporting & Criticism Program Speaker NYC
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War Photographer is director Christian Frei's 2001 film that followed photojournalist James Nachtwey. Natchtwey started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico in 1976 and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

The film received an Academy Award Nomination for "Best Documentary Feature" and won twelve International Filmfestivals.

Annenberg Auditorium

Brendan Fay Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities Speaker Stanford University
Seminars
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David Lobell
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FSE Center Fellow David Lobell was among three recipients of the Macelwane Medal honored for significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by an outstanding young scientist (less than 36 years of age). Established in 1961, the Macelwane Medal is awarded annually by the American Geophysical Union.

The Macelwane Medal was renamed in 1986 in honor of former AGU president James B. Macelwane (1953-1956). Renowned for his contributions to geophysics, Macelwane was deeply interested in teaching and encouraging young scientists. The Macelwane Medal is awarded annually to as many as three or, under exceptional circumstances, up to five individuals "for significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by an outstanding young scientist (less than 36 years of age)." Nominees must be less than 36 years of age on 1 January of the year of presentation. James N. Brune was the first recipient of this medal.

James B. Macelwane was a seismologist at Saint Louis University. During the 1920s and 1930s, working with students and colleagues, he used seismic P waves to derive early velocity models of the mantle, developed travel time curves for numerous seismic phases, developed methods for hypocentral determinations of deep earthquakes, and showed that 4 to 10 s microseisms are traveling waves originating from storms at sea. Macelwane was a leader in establishing seismology on a firm theoretical basis. His textbook, Introduction to Theoretical Seismology, was published in 1936.

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In partnership with the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies (ICA) and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), the Program on Human Rights (PHR) offers the Stanford Human Rights Education Initiative (SHREI), which promotes human rights education in California community colleges.

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Dr. Katzenstein completed his undergraduate and medical degrees as well as a residency in Internal Medicine and Fellowship training in Infectious Diseases at the University of California San Diego. He continued fellowship training in virology and Infectious Diseases with Dr. Colin Jordan at U.C. Davis, moving to the University of Minnesota to a faculty position in Infectious Disease in 1984. He was a visiting lecturer for two years in the Departments of Medical Microbiology and Medicine at the University University of Zimbabwe as the AIDS epidemic was first recognized in Southern Africa. In 1987, he returned to the U.S. to take up a senior research fellowship at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the Food and Drug Administration in the Vaccine Branch, evaluating early candidate HIV Vaccines and diagnostics. Dr. Katzenstein returned to California in 1989 to work with Dr. Thomas Merigan and the AIDS Clinical Trials Group. He continues an active collaboration with his colleagues in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa in prevention, perinatal transmission and vaccine research. At Stanford, Dr. Katzenstein participates in studies of multiple drugs and drug combinations in Clinical Trials in the U.S. and Europe and is the principal investigator for Stanford's Virology Service Laboratory in the center for AIDS Research. At Stanford he teaches an undergraduate course in Global AIDS, attends on the Infectious Disease service and supervises both laboratory and clinical fellows conducting AIDS Research. He remains actively involved in studies of HIV infection in Zimbabwe, spending 2-3 months a year in Southern Africa.

Professor Katzenstein's research interests include treatment and evaluation of HIV infection in the United States and Europe through the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG). His international HIV pathogenesis work includes studies in Zimbabwe, South Africa. The lab currently is focused on drug resistance, envelope tropism and the pathogenesis of HIV.

Encina West 208

Helen Stacy Moderator
David Katzenstein Professor (Research), Medicine - Infectious Diseases; Member, Bio-X Speaker Stanford University
Workshops
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Did Jordan's general elections, called forth after parliament's dissolution a year earlier, introduce new hope for democratic reform in an increasingly autocratic kingdom?  The panel of speakers at this research seminar will address the aftermath of the parliamentary contest of November 2010, assessing broad trends in this critical state following the November elections.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Khalil Barhoum Sr. Lecturer Moderator Stanford University
Anne Marie Baylouny Assistant Professor Panelist Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA

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CDDRL Hewlett Fellow 2009-2010
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Sean Yom finished his Ph.D. at the Department of Government at Harvard University in June 2009, with a dissertation entitled "Iron Fists in Silk Gloves: Building Political Regimes in the Middle East." His primary research explores the origins and durability of authoritarian regimes in this region. His work contends that initial social conflicts driven by strategic Western interventions shaped the social coalitions constructed by autocratic incumbents to consolidate power in the mid-twentieth century--early choices that ultimately shaped the institutional carapaces and political fates of these governments. While at CDDRL, he will revise the dissertation in preparation for book publication, with a focus on expanding the theory to cover other post-colonial regions and states. His other research interests encompass contemporary political reforms in the Arab world, the historical architecture of Persian Gulf security, and US democracy promotion in the Middle East. Recent publications include articles in the Journal of Democracy, Middle East Report, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Arab Studies Journal.

Sean Yom Assistant Professor Panelist Temple University
Marwan Hanania Panelist Stanford University
Seminars
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Born in New York in 1977, Nir Rosen has been reporting from Iraq since April of 2003 and has spent most of the last seven and a half years in Iraq. He recently returned from a trip to seven provinces in the country. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Mexico, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Turkey and Egypt. He has written for magazines such as The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and most major American publications. He has filmed documentaries. He is a Fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security. His new book, Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World, is about occupation, resistance, sectarianism and civil war from Iraq to Lebanon to Afghanistan.

CISAC Conference Room

Nir Rosen Writer, journalist, filmaker and Fellow Speaker The Center on Law and Security, NYU School of Law
Seminars
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