Stanford University

U.S.-China cooperation on global issues crucial

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China's President Hu Jintao conducted a high-profile visit to the United States in late January 2011, during which he discussed economics, security, and climate change with President Barack Obama. Speaking with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Thomas Fingar stressed the importance of Washington and Beijing finding common ground for cooperation on crucial global issues.
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President Barack Obama and President Hu Jintao of China begin their working dinner in the Old Family Dining Room of the White House, Jan. 18, 2011.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza
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Environmental Impact of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Rod Ewing Visiting Professor at CISAC; Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Michigan Speaker
Seminars

U.S. Preventative War in the Nuclear Age: A Reassessment

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Francis Gavin Director, Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security & Law Speaker University of Texas at Austin
Mira Rapp-Hooper PhD Student Speaker Columbia University
Seminars

Survival Migration: Old Institutions, New Challenges

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Alexander Betts

not in residence

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Postdoctoral Fellow
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Dr. Alexander Betts is the Hedley Bull research fellow in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he is also director of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Global Migration Governance project. He received his MPhil (with distinction) and DPhil from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the international politics of refugee protection and migration. His main academic focus is on understanding the conditions under which international cooperation takes place in the refugee regime and other areas of migration. In particular, the theoretical focus of his work is on the dynamics of international institutions: on a ‘horizontal' level (across issue-areas and policy fields) and on a ‘vertical' level (between the global and the national level). He has worked on a range of policy issues including forced migration and development, protracted refugee situations, and the protection of vulnerable irregular migrants.  His research has a geographical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and he has carried out extensive fieldwork across the region, including in South Africa, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the DRC. He has taught a range of graduate courses including ‘International Relations Theory', ‘International Relations of the Developing World' and ‘Forced Migration and International Relations'. He is on the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). He has previously worked for UNHCR, and been a consultant to UNHCR, IOM, and the Council of Europe.

 

(Profile last updated in September 2011.)

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Alexander Betts Post-doctoral Fellow Speaker CISAC
Brenna Powell Predoctoral Fellow, CISAC; PhD Candidate, Harvard University Commentator
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The ethics of the draft

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Who should fight? It is no idle question in an era in which thousands of U.S. troops are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq to protect Americans back home. In fact, the answer has profound consequences for the way policymakers make decisions about how these wars are waged. On Dec. 2, scholars from Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University examined this issue as part of the Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011), co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Their conclusion: there is a wide and troubling divide between the 2.4 million Americans who volunteer to serve in the military and the many millions more who choose not to.

The statistics are revealing: During World War II, some 16 million men, and several thousand women, served in the military, representing 12 percent of the U.S. population. They came from all walks of life, and those who stayed home made sacrifices of their own for the greater war effort. But while the U.S. population has more than doubled since then, the military is now just 4 percent of the size it was in the 1940s. At the same time, today's wars require virtually no sacrifice at home, and those who enlist come from an extremely narrow demographic segment of the U.S. population. According to Stanford historian David Kennedy, who spoke at the event, in 2007, only 2.6 percent of enlisted personnel had exposure to college, compared to 32 percent of men age 18 to 24 in the general population. The military is disproportionately composed of racial, ethnic, and other demographic minorities, he noted. The political elites making the decisions about warfare seldom have children serving. Among the 535 elected members of Congress in 2008 only 10 had children in the military.

The implications of this are vast. A lack of personal familiarity for many Americans with the military breeds to some puzzling behavior, says Eliot Cohen, the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Congressmen say they can't imagine U.S. troops committing the kinds of atrocities recorded at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; left-leaning anti-war advocates at Moveon.org refer to General David Petraeus, the highly regarded commander of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as General Betray Us. More than that, a large gap between those who make the decisions about war and those who fight it raises serious questions about accountability. The Vietnam-era draft inspired thousands of Americans to push back against Washington's decisions to expand the war. Conversely, the existence of the all volunteer army, in effect since 1973, may have one been one reason for the relatively smaller level of protest in the run up to, and the execution of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, at a 2006 Oval Office meeting with President George W. Bush, Kennedy said the president told him that if the draft had been in place he "would have been impeached by now."

The gap also raises concerns about civic unity. Earth-shaking events such as World War II and Sept. 11 brought citizens together, says Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. But sustaining that unity is extremely difficult, and becomes even more so when one segment of the population is willing to give its life to protect Americans while the vast majority go on with their lives without making any sacrifice of their own. To Elshtain, this raises a basic issue of fairness and social justice. There is a general lack of equity, she says, when "some families bear a radically disproportionate burden of service and sacrifice." As their peers "study or work or frolic, they die" in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Redressing this imbalance is an extraordinary challenge. Surely a draft would help. But it raises ethical questions of its own. There is also no political will to reinstate it. Nor, says Cohen, is it necessary or even desirable from a military perspective. A better set of solutions, he suggests, would start with expanding the depth and scope of relations between civilians and military personnel. He recommends siting military bases around the country so that civilians in New England, say, where there is virtually no military presence, can have greater exposure to an institution about which many of them know very little. Elite universities such as Stanford and Harvard, which have long prohibited on-campus ROTC activities, should start revisiting and revising their policies so that over time the military will have a wider diversity of background. Doing so might enrich the campus experience, and it could also lead to a stronger military in which the highly educated graduates of America's elite educational institutions would take a greater role influencing America's elite military institutions. For now, Kennedy observes, we have effectively "hired some of the least advantaged of our fellow countrymen to do some of our most dangerous business." And we continue down this path at our peril.

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Norman Naimark redefines "genocide"

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In his new book, Stalin's Genocides (Princeton University Press), CISAC affiliated faculty member and research affiliate at The Europe Center Norman M. Naimark proposes an expansion of the standard definition of genocide: the systematic mass murder of national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. Naimark argues that the definition of the "crime of crimes" should be expanded to include social classes and political groups, and uses Josef Stalin's rule as a case in point.

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Performance of Trimpin's Drama, The Gurs Zyklus

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The Gurs Zyklus, performance of Trimpin's stirring and uncategorizable reflection on memory and remembrance, tragedy and renewal, exploration and wonder.From the astonishing mind of MacArthur "Genius Award"- winning inventor and sound sculptor, Trimpin: A stirring and uncategorizable reflection on memory and remembrance, tragedy and renewal, exploration and wonder.

Combining live performance with kinetic sculpture, and world history with personal biography, The Gurs Zyklus ("Gurs Cycle") represents the fruits of a lifetime of curiosity, investigation, inspired tinkering, and riveting invention on the part of Trimpin, the brilliant artist of one name and no definable genre.

As a youth in southwestern Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Trimpin (as he was then known) was haunted by the fact that, in the Nazi era, the Jews from his town had all been deported to the internment camp at Gurs, near the Spanish-French border. Decades later, Trimpin worked with maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow, who revealed that he, too, had been interned at Gurs-during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, a 2006 New Yorker profile of Trimpin mentioned this Gurs connection. Trimpin was contacted shortly thereafter by Victor Rosenberg, a descendant of a family interned at Gurs, who, having read the article, offered the artist the use of more than 200 of his family's letters mailed from the camp.

These and other elements, united by history, profound coincidence, and the power of Trimpin's imagination, weave together in a stage performance truly like no other: Vocalists sing and speak texts drawn from the Rosenberg letters into "fire organs" of Trimpin's invention. Projections of historic images from Gurs meld with film from Trimpin's own retracing of the journey by train to the camp. The music of Nancarrow meets sounds derived from bark patterns of the trees near Gurs-among the last living "witnesses" to the camp's dark history. Throughout, Gurs Zyklus offers a novel perspective on an important story now at the edges of living memory, as well as a stage experience that is immersive and deeply moving.

POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSION with Trimpin and Jenny Bilfield.

This event is sponsored by Stanford Lively Arts.

For more information, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War Series website.

Stanford Memorial Auditorium
551 Serra Mall
Stanford Univeristy
Stanford, CA 94305

Seminars
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)

Trimpin in Conversation with Mark Gonnerman

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Trimpin discusses his year-long Stanford residency and his new work which combines kinetic musical sculpture with emotionally-powerful WWII history.

As a youth in southwestern Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Trimpin (as he was then known) was haunted by the fact that, in the Nazi era, the Jews from his town had all been deported to the internment camp at Gurs, near the Spanish-French border. Decades later, Trimpin worked with maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow, who revealed that he, too, had been interned at Gurs-during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, a 2006 New Yorker profile of Trimpin mentioned this Gurs connection. Trimpin was contacted shortly thereafter by Victor Rosenberg, a descendant of a family interned at Gurs, who, having read the article, offered the artist the use of more than 200 of his family's letters mailed from the camp. These and other elements, united by history, profound coincidence, and the power of Trimpin's imagination, come together in a unique multimedia stage performance, The Gurs Zyklus, that will be presented by Stanford Lively Arts on Saturday, May 14.

This event is sponsored by the Aurora Forum.

For more information, please visit Stanford's Ethics and War Series webstie.

Pigott Theater
551 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA

Trimpin MacArthur "Genius Award" winning inventor and sound sculptor Speaker
Paul DeMarinis Speaker Department of Art, Stanford University
Mark Gonnerman Director, Aurora Forum Moderator Stanford University
Seminars
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)

Film: "Fog of War"

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The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. The film, directed by Errol Morris, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003) and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature (2003).

Using archival footage, United States Cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the eighty-five-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts McNamara's life, from his birth during the First World War remembering the time American troops returned from Europe, to working as a WWII Whiz Kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to his being employed as Secretary of Defense and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to managing the American Vietnam War, as defense secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson — emphasizing the war's brutality under their regimes, and how he was hired as secretary of defense, despite limited military experience.

According to Morris, hearing McNamara raise all of these ethical issues and questions about a war which most of us see as morally unambiguous is very, very powerful. What Morris especially liked about the film was that it proved it was possible to make a movie about events – events that are removed from us by 40, 50, 60 years but which are very much about today. Many of the issues that McNamara is talking about in the movie are relevant to what's going on right now, and there's this surreal sense that nothing has changed.

» Watch the trailer.

Faculty talk back led by Scott Sagan (Co-Director of Center for International Security and Cooperation / Political Science, Stanford)

Annenberg Auditorium, 435 Lasuen Mall
Stanford University

Scott D. Sagan

CISAC
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 Daedalus: Ethics, 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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Seminars
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)

Film: "War Photographer"

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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
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)
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