What can possibly explain the transformation that sometimes happens from non-violent civilian to combatant to criminal? Pulitzer Prize winning author and CISAC affiliate Richard Rhodes tackled this bedeviling question head-on in a recent lecture for Stanford's Ethics & War series, co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Drawing heavily upon the work of Lonnie H. Athens, a Seton Hall University criminology professor, about whom Rhodes wrote a 1999 book entitled Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist, Rhodes argued that all violent criminals go through a process that Athens called "violentization." The first stage, "brutalization," consists of witnessing abusive or violent behavior, often at a young age, and receiving encouragement to act in a similar way to resolve disputes. In the second stage, "belligerency," the individual takes stock of what has happened, examines his or her situation, and decides to begin to move to the third stage: using serious violence, if provoked, as a means of protection.

In Rhodes' view, this process is essentially identical to the training a military recruit undergoes. Both, he says, go through a period of re-socialization during which even lethal violence become acceptable, expected, and rewarded. Military recruits are "deliberately and systematically rebuked, scorned and punished for civilian behavior  and coached and rewarded for military behavior including the controlled use of violence," he observes. "Violent domination, personal horrification and violent coaching are fundamental to basic military training." There is, however, a fundamental difference. The violent criminal moves on to a fourth stage, "virulence," in which the individual becomes willing to commit serious violence without provocation and embraces the sense of confidence and power created by the successful completion of these acts. The soldier, by contrast, is constrained within the third stage of violentization by the rule of law, by ethics, by codes of honor, and "implicitly," says Rhodes, "support from military leaders up the chain of command," who "are expected to limit their demands of violent action to appropriately defensive campaigns."

Within these constraints, the limitations of violence are clear. Self-defense is justifiable, and by extension so is the killing of an enemy combatant. Even the strategic bombing during World War II (and presumably more recently) can be justified with such arguments, Rhodes argues, "although that logic grew increasingly thin as the bombing expanded from military targets to military industrial targets and finally to the homes and neighborhoods of enemy civilians."

What, then, to make of My Lai, in which American soldiers killed babies and children, the Einsatzgruppen, who shot hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews with horrific efficiency, or the heinous war crimes committed in conflicts around the world? In these cases, the perpetrators have found themselves moving into virulence. The constraints that circumscribed their violent actions have broken down. Authorities in the chain of command either overlooked or ignored the need to enforce the limitations required to prevent criminal violence. In the eyes of the perpetrators, and in some cases those making the direct orders, the enemy became an omnipotent and ubiquitous presence, and the power that came with committing lethal violence was overwhelming. The line between self-defense and murder became so attenuated that it was essentially meaningless. Virtually the only possible outcome: unrestrained lethal violence.

Rhodes argues that the need to understand this dynamic has become increasingly urgent. The nuclear deterrent has largely foreclosed the prospect of conventional war, and "modern combat has strained the traditional limitations of violence on war to the breaking point and beyond." Modern weapons make it possible to do more lethal violence than the old days of single-shot rifles and hand grenades, he says, and the line between combatants and civilians can become difficult to define.

The quandary now is how to ensure that the process of violentization among members of the military does not extend to the fourth category. Even Heinrich Himmler, commander of the Einsatzgruppen, understood this on some level. He was horrified, Rhodes says, that members of his elite fighting squad had become such enthusiastic killers that they would take it upon themselves to find and shoot Jews. Others, in other wartime situations, unable to deal with the consequences of their actions as they meandered toward that fourth stage, killed themselves, suffered serious psychological problems, or committed acts of violence back at home. Now we are seeing similar consequences among the men and women who are forced to draw distinctions every day between civilian and enemy combatants. Indeed, he says, only the ethical and legal limitations put on soldiers, and enforced by their superiors in the chain of command, can protect them from becoming malevolently violent. Failing to maintain these restrictions has dire consequences. As Rhodes and many others before him have said, "as we sow, so shall we reap."

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar  (MA ’96, PhD ’00), a lawyer, scholar, and former official in the Clinton and Obama administrations, will assume the position of co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at the conclusion of the current academic year, FSI Director Coit D. Blacker and Law School Dean Larry Kramer have announced.

An expert in administrative law, international security, and public health and safety, Cuéllar is Professor and the Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, and is also professor (by courtesy) of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He is a longtime affiliated faculty member at CISAC, where he currently serves on the executive committee. He has collaborated with or served on the boards of several civil society organizations, including the Haas Center for Public Service, Asylum Access, and the American Constitution Society.

“I’m delighted that Tino has agreed to serve as co-director of FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation,” says Coit D. Blacker, FSI’s director and the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies. “He will bring to the job just the right combination of skills, talents, and sensibilities to assure the Center’s continuing relevance and future success. Tino is an acclaimed scholar, an outstanding teacher, and an experienced policymaker who thinks hard and very creatively about the most pressing national and international security issues of our time – including problems of executive power and accountability, public health, and migration. Finding someone to take the reins at CISAC following Scott D. Sagan’s long and successful tenure as co-director was never going to be easy. But with Siegfried S. Hecker and now Tino Cuéllar at the helm, I think we’ve put together a winning team.”

Cuéllar has had an extensive record of public service since joining Stanford Law School faculty in 2001. Recently, he served in the Obama Administration as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy at the White House. In that role, he led the Domestic Policy Council’s work on criminal justice and drug policy, public health and food safety, regulatory reform, borders and immigration, civil rights, and rural and agricultural policy.  Among other responsibilities, he represented the Domestic Policy Council in the development of the first-ever Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, and coordinated the President’s Food Safety Working Group.

"Tino's decision to become co-director of CISAC is good for everyone,” said Larry Kramer, Richard E. Lang Professor and Dean of Stanford Law School. “It's a great opportunity for him to pursue and build on his expertise in national security. It adds an innovative and forward-thinking mind and voice to CISAC. And it will generate tremendous new opportunities for collaboration between the Law School and CISAC, to the great benefit of our students and faculty."

In July 2010, when Cuéllar left the Obama administration to return to Stanford, he also accepted an appointment from the President of the United States to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a non-partisan agency charged with recommending improvements in the efficiency and fairness of federal regulatory programs.  Before joining the White House staff, Cuéllar co-chaired the Obama-Biden Transition’s Immigration Policy Working Group.  Earlier in his career, during the second term of the Clinton Administration, Cuéllar worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Enforcement, focusing on countering financial crime, improving border coordination, and enhancing anti-corruption measures.

Cuéllar graduated from Calexico High School in rural Southern California, going on to receive a BA magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1993, a JD from Yale Law School in 1997, and a PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2000. Cuéllar clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 2000 to 2001.

Cuéllar will join current CISAC co-director Siegfried Hecker, professor (research) of management science and engineering and FSI senior fellow, in leading one of the country’s preeminent university-based research centers on international security and cooperation. He will succeed longtime co-director Scott Sagan, who has been leading the Center since 1998. “I am extremely pleased that Tino Cuéllar will be joining me,” said Hecker.  “He will build on the extraordinary leadership that Scott Sagan has provided over the last 12 years, and his outstanding academic credentials and deep experience in Washington crafting security policy will be a tremendous asset to CISAC."

Sagan, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science and FSI senior fellow, will continue as an important presence at CISAC and FSI, with plans to focus on policy-related research for the American Academy of Arts and Science's Global Nuclear Future Initiative, where he serves as the co-chair with Harvard’s Steven Miller. Sagan has been instrumental in building CISAC’s capacity as an international leader in interdisciplinary university-based research and training aimed at tackling some of the world's most difficult security problems. “CISAC is a small national treasure inside this great university: a multidisciplinary research institution that consistently produces rigorous policy-relevant scholarship and creatively trains the next generation of international security specialists,” said Sagan. “I am proud to have helped lead the Center for the past 12 years, and am equally excited to be staying on at CISAC as a faculty member in residence."

"Tino Cuéllar will be a spectacular co-director for CISAC,” he added. “His joint legal and political science training brings new perspectives to international and national problems and his research on the security implications of U.S. immigration law, on efforts to combat terrorist financing, and on the politics of transnational law enforcement places new and important subjects directly onto the CISAC global policy agenda."

As a little girl Susie Linfield was captivated by a book she discovered on her parents' bookshelf entitled The Black Book of Polish Jewry. Published in the early 1940s, it included photos of starving Jews in the ghettos. “I was grieved by them. I was shamed by them. But I was also sort of compelled by them,” says Linfield, the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program at New York University. Decades later, she reflected again on the way photographs informed her view of war and atrocities as she examined the photos emerging from the Balkans, Rwanda, and other trouble spots. In her new book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (University of Chicago Press), Linfield returns to this theme. She recently gave a talk at Stanford as part of the Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011), sponsored in part by the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and she spoke with CISAC about changes in photojournalism, the political context behind warfare, and what she calls “the ethics of seeing.” Excerpts:

CISAC: In your book you look at two different approaches to war photography—that of Robert Capa, the Hungarian war photographer of the 1930s and 1940s, and the modern war photographer James Nachtwey, who has chronicled more recent conflict. How are world events reflected in their photography?

Linfield: One of the observations in my book is that war and its related atrocities are photographed in a much more graphic way than they used to be. The level of atrocity and bodily disfigurement that we are now used to seeing in photographs is something very different than the kind of photojournalism that was done in the 1920s through the 1950s. That connects in some ways to the lessening of political certainty. In other words, the kind of political and ideological factors that used to determine war are much less prevalent in a lot of the wars that are being fought now. If you look at the war in the Congo, it’s just a horrific, horrific situation with millions of people killed. But it’s very hard to understand that war in any sort of traditional political paradigm, certainly not the paradigm of something like the Spanish civil war. There, one could understand the political dynamics and certainly feel solidarity with one side or another. With a lot of the wars we're presented with now, I think that kind of solidarity and political clarity is very, very hard to come by. So I think what we’re presented with visually is the bodily disfigurement, the tortured bodies, but without any kind of political context in which to understand it.

CISAC: How are today’s photos perceived by viewers, as opposed to back in Capa’s time?

L: I think there’s much more resistance to seeing photographs now than there was in Capa’s time. And again I think that’s connected to the lack of political clarity. People aren’t really sure why they’re seeing them or what to think when they do, and I think that has turned into a resentment against photography and against photojournalism in particular—that we’re just being assaulted by these meaningless images. These images aren’t meaningless. But they do take a lot of work to try to understand.

CISAC: How is this tied to ethics?

L: I think there is something I would call the ethics of seeing. To me that’s not an instantaneous thing. It would be very connected to the idea of really trying to delve into the histories that these photographs suggest and really trying to understand them and understand the causes of the violence. And in terms of the ethics of showing, I am much less critical of photojournalists than I think a lot of other critics are, especially with someone like James Nachtwey. He’s accused of being a pornographer, exploiting—his stuff is disgusting, unbearable, unwatchable. And it is disgusting and unbearable in certain ways, but I don’t think he’s a pornographer. And I don’t think he’s a nihilist. I think he’s showing us images that are very, very difficult to look at. And they’re very, very difficult to look at for two reasons. One, the explicitness of them is very, very painful. To see bodies that tormented is extraordinarily painful. And I think they’re also difficult to look at because it’s very hard to have a political context in which to understand these images. In a certain sense we’re sort of left with our troubled emotions, but not really knowing what to do with them.