CISAC has endowed its first William J. Perry International Security Fellowship with $1 million in private donations. The fellowship is one of several visiting positions for pre- and postdoctoral researchers that CISAC plans to establish in honor of Perry, the 19th U.S. secretary of defense and former CISAC co-director.

The center announced the first fellowship endowment at a dinner Oct. 17 to celebrate William J. Perry's 80th birthday.

"We live in an era of increased opportunity and peril. Issues of international security have grown in scope and complexity," said Stanford University president John L. Hennessy, who attended the dinner. "The Perry fellowship program will provide a vital training ground for tomorrow's leaders, giving them the opportunity to work across disciplines and develop solutions to these difficult challenges."

Perry fellows will reside at CISAC for a year of policy-relevant research on international security issues. They will join other distinguished scientists, social scientists, and engineers who work together on security problems that cannot be solved within any single field of study. CISAC researchers address overlapping issues in nuclear weapons policy, proliferation, and regional tensions; biosecurity; homeland security; and effective global engagement.

"The fellowships are a fitting tribute to a scholar and leader whose many years of service continue to provide a more secure future for all of us," said CISAC co-director Siegfried S. Hecker.

"Bill Perry guided CISAC and its science program during a formative period, as its second science co-director," said Scott D. Sagan, CISAC co-director. "The center continues to benefit immeasurably from the early leadership he provided as well as from his ongoing contributions in teaching, research, and policy advising."

Perry's career offers a model of sound policy informed by rigorous scholarship. With bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics from Stanford and a PhD from Penn State, he became a leader in the electronics industry and a frequent advisor to the U.S. government on national security technologies. He served as U.S. undersecretary of defense for research and engineering in 1977 and returned to industry in 1981. Perry served as co-director of CISAC from 1988 until 1993, when he was called back to Washington to be secretary of defense.

In awarding Perry the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1997, former President Bill Clinton said, "When the history of our time is written, Bill Perry may well be recorded as the most productive, effective secretary of defense the United States ever had."

Perry returned to Stanford, where he continues to teach and mentor students who will carry on his tradition of leadership. At CISAC he co-directs the Preventive Defense Project, a research collaboration between Stanford and Harvard universities.

The American Physical Society awarded CISAC research associate Pavel Podvig and Anatoli Diyakov, at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), its 2008 Leo Szilard Lectureship, a recognition of "outstanding accomplishments by physicists in promoting the use of physics for the benefit of society."

The APS specifically cited the two "for establishing a center for scientific study of arms control, for landmark analyses, and for courage in supporting open discussion of international security in Russia."

Diyakov and Princeton colleague Frank von Hippel in 1991 founded the Center for Arms Control, Energy, and Environment Studies at MIPT, with substantial help from Podvig, a 1988 graduate of the institute with a degree in physics. The center was Russia's first independent research organization dedicated to technical analysis of arms control issues.

Podvig's research at the center addressed issues concerning missile defense; early-warning, command, and control systems for nuclear weapons; and U.S.-Russian arms control. He led a major research project and edited the resulting book, Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces, consulted internationally as a definitive work on the subject.

Martha Crenshaw is a pioneer in terrorism studies, one of a handful of scholars worldwide who started investigating the subject long before Sept. 11, 2001.

Crenshaw, who joined CISAC this year as a senior fellow at FSI and a political science professor by courtesy, brings three decades of study to her current agenda of examining distinctions between so-called old and new terrorism, how terrorism ends, and why the United States is the target of terrorism.

"We are very fortunate to have Martha Crenshaw join CISAC as a senior fellow," said Scott Sagan, CISAC co-director. "Her detailed knowledge of the inside workings of terrorist organizations and her deep understanding of earlier counter-terrorist campaigns have brought much-needed historical perspective to contemporary policy debates after 9/11."

Associate professor of law Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who led the search that resulted in Crenshaw's hiring, said her "combination of attention to historical detail, interdisciplinary methods, and knowledge of institutional context has made her one of the nation's foremost scholars of terrorism. Her appointment is great news for CISAC and Stanford, where she will strengthen an already significant scholarly community working on homeland security and terrorism."

Coming to Stanford from Wesleyan University, where she was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and a government professor, Crenshaw said she found the opportunity to join an interdisciplinary research center a welcome change.

"CISAC's and my interests merged perfectly," she said, as the center was looking to build its research expertise in terrorism. She said she looks forward to teaching graduate students in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies as well as working with research colleagues at CISAC and across campus.

Crenshaw's terrorism studies began with a graduate seminar paper she wrote on actions by the FLN, or National Liberation Front, during Algeria's war for independence from France in the 1950s and 60s. She arrived at the topic the way many professors advise students to do--she noted in a study of Vietnam-era guerrilla warfare the comment that "no one has studied terrorism."

That seminar paper inspired her dissertation, which formed the basis of her 1978 book, Revolutionary Terrorism: The FLN in Algeria, 1954-1962, a case study in the strategic use of terrorism by a revolutionary nationalist movement.

Having written numerous articles and edited four books on terrorism, Crenshaw is now editing a book tentatively titled The Consequences of Counterterrorist Policies in Democracies. The Russell Sage Foundation supported the research, which Crenshaw said illuminates issues such as "the strength of executive power, effects of counterterrorism legislation on minorities, and unintended consequences of counterterrorism policies."

As a lead investigator with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, Crenshaw is also researching why the United States is the target of terrorism, a study that could be especially useful in informing counterterrorism policy.

Crenshaw "trace[s] the evolution of anti-American terrorism over time--since the mid-1960s," she said, comparing groups that used terrorism to others with similar ideas that have not resorted to terrorism. Comparing case studies, she explained, allows her to "analyze incentives for the use of terrorism."

In "The Debate over 'New' versus 'Old' Terrorism," a paper Crenshaw presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in September--and which will be published as a chapter in an edited volume, she questions oft-heard claims that terrorism in recent years has taken on a new character to become more religious and lethal. She found the distinctions too hastily drawn and possibly dangerous.

"There is no fundamental difference between 'old' and 'new' terrorism," she said.

"Rejecting our accumulated knowledge of terrorism by dismissing it as 'obsolete'" would be a mistake that could lead to bad policy choices, she added. Before 9/ll, assumptions that "new" terrorism would forsake the "old" technique of hijacking and turn to weapons of mass destruction turned out to be wrong, she pointed out.

Crenshaw said researchers and policymakers should "ask why some groups cause large numbers of civilian casualties and others do not, rather than assuming that religious beliefs are the explanation for lethality."