David Cortright


David Cortright is an American scholar and peace activist. He is 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. Cortright has a long history of public advocacy for disarmament and the prevention of war.

Biography

Cortright is a 1968 graduate of the University of Notre Dame. In 1970 he received his M.A. from New York University, and completed his doctoral studies in 1975 at the Union Institute in residence at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
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 1977, Cortright was named the executive director of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, which under his direction became the largest disarmament organization in the U.S. Cortright initiated the 1987 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.
Starting in 2014, he fought to have the Department of Defense change a "rose-colored portrayal" of the Vietnam War on the government agency's website. Following the 2016 Colombian peace agreement referendum, he worked on the implementation of the 300-page agreement.

Work

Cortright has written widely on nonviolent social change, nuclear disarmament, and the use of multilateral sanctions and incentives as tools of international diplomacy. He has provided research services to several foreign ministries, including those of Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, Denmark, and The Netherlands, and has advised 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.

Books

He is the author or co-editor of 19 books:
Over the past fifteen years, he and Lopez have written or co-edited a series of major works on multilateral sanctions, including: