Ambassador Sen was born on 9 April 1944. After graduating from college he joined the Indian Foreign Service in July 1966. From May 1968 to July 1984, Sen served in Indian missions and posts in Moscow, San Francisco, Dhaka and in the Ministry of External Affairs. He also served as secretary to the Atomic Energy Commission of India.

From July 1984 to December 1985, Sen served as the joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs. He was thereafter joint secretary to the prime minister of India from January 1986 to July 1991 where he was responsible for foreign affairs, defense, and science and technology.

Mr. Sen was ambassador to Mexico from September 1991 to August 1992; ambassador to the Russian Federation from October 1992 to October 1998; ambassador to Germany from October 1998 to May 2002; and high commissioner to the United Kingdom from May 2002 to April 2004. He assumed charge as ambassador of India to the United States of America in August 2004.

The Ambassador participated in summit meetings in the United Nations, Commonwealth, Non-Aligned Movement, Six Nation Five Continent Peace Initiative, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, IAEA, G-15 and other forums and also in over 160 bilateral summit meetings. He had several assignments as special envoy of the prime minister of India for meetings with foreign government representatives and heads of state.

The Ambassador's visit is co-sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Freeman Spogli Institute and the Stanford Center for International Development at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

What course should the United States take in Iraq? Scott Sagan, director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, will moderate a panel discussion featuring three of the nation's leading thinkers on this question, from 12 noon to 1 p.m. in the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall at Stanford University.

William J. Perry, the 19th U.S. defense secretary, will discuss the analysis and recommendations that he and his colleagues in the Iraq Study Group recently presented in their final report to the president and the public. Larry Diamond, who served as a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and James Fearon, a civil war expert who has presented Congressional testimony on Iraq, will offer perspectives based on their experiences and research. Diamond is the author of Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq. Fearon is the author of "The Civil War in Iraq," to appear in Foreign Affairs' March-April 2007 issue.

Sagan will moderate as the panel entertains questions from the audience. Admission is free, and the public is invited to attend.

This is a joint Science, Technology, and Security Seminar and CISAC Directors' Seminar. Lunch will be served, and RSVP is required.

Daniel Byman is the director of Georgetown's Security Studies Program and the Center for Peace and Security Studies as well as an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service. He has served as a professional staff member with the 9/11 Commission and with the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Before joining the inquiry staff he was the research director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation. He is the author of Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism; Keeping the Peace: Lasting Solutions to Ethnic Conflict; and co-author of The Dynamics of Coercion: American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might. He has also written widely on a range of topics related to terrorism, international security, and the Middle East.

Drell Lecture Recording: NA

Drell Lecture Transcript:

Speaker's Biography: Thom Shanker is the national security and foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. He joined the Times in 1997 and began covering the Pentagon in May 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks. Previously, Shanker was foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune. From 1992 to 1995, as the Tribune's senior European correspondent, based in Berlin, he covered the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the departure of American, British, French, and Russian forces from Berlin; and emerging cases of nuclear smuggling in Central Europe.

Shanker spent two years in the master's degree program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, specializing in strategic studies and international law. He has written on foreign policy, military affairs, and the intelligence community for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and American Journalism Review.

Noah Richmond (speaker) is a CISAC Zukerman Fellow and a Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation fellow. His research has focused on the structure and management of the U.S. officer corps, organizing the U.S. military for new domains of warfare including space and cyberspace, and ballistic missile defense. His current research focuses on international, supra-national, and national control regimes for dual-use technologies. Most recently he co-chaired the working group on new domains of warfare for the Beyond Goldwater-Nichols Study conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Richmond has previously consulted for the Institute for Defense Analyses, RAND, and Strategic Decisions Group. He received his BS in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MS in engineering-economic systems and operations research from Stanford, and a PhD in management science and engineering from Stanford. Richmond is currently a law student at Stanford Law School (class of 2008), where his studies focus on intellectual property and international trade.

David Elliott (respondent) was staff director for science and technology at the National Security Council (NCS) and then vice president at SAIC and SRI. At NCS his portfolio included export control matters, which included the international coordination of our policy. During his time at NCS, major emphases emerged on civilian nuclear issues after the Indian nuclear test and on computer technology as its importance became evident. At CISAC he has contributed to work in cyber security and information technology. Elliott received his BS in physics from Stanford University and both his MS and PhD in experimental high energy physics from the California Institute of Technology.

Philip Roessler (speaker) is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC and in 2007 will be the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in comparative government at the University of Oxford. His PhD dissertation examines the effects of political authority on conflict initiation and escalation in Africa, with a focus on Sudan, where he conducted field research between March 2005 and April 2006. His article, "Donor-Induced Democratization and Privatization of State-Violence in Kenya and Rwanda," was published in Comparative Politics in January 2005 and his article (co-authored with Marc Morjé Howard), "Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes," appeared in the American Journal of Political Science in April 2006. Roessler is a PhD candidate in the department of government and politics at the University of Maryland and he received his BA in political science from Indiana University.

Macartan Humphreys (respondent) is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting professor at CISAC. He is a research scholar at the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute at Columbia and a member of the Millennium Development goals project poverty task force, where he works on conflict and development issues. Overall his research is on African political economy and formal political theory. His dissertation on the politics of factions developed game theoretic models of conflict and cooperation between internally divided groups. More recent research focuses on rebellions in West Africa, where he has undertaken field research in the Casamance, Mali, and Sierra Leone. Ongoing research now includes experimental work on ethnic politics, econometric work on natural resource conflicts, game theoretic work on ethnic politics and large N survey work of ex-combatants in Sierra Leone. Humphreys' work is motivated by concerns over the linkages between politics, conflict and human development. He received his PhD in government from Harvard in 2003 and his MPhil in economics from Oxford in 2000.