Politics and Protest: Historical, Sociological, and Political Perspectives

Drawing from first-hand experience and research into the U.S. nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s and the Iraq antiwar movement of 2002-09, David Cortright (University of Notre Dame) will discuss the challenge of attempting to evaluate if policy is shaped by social movements against war and nuclear weapons.

By examining specific episodes and social action campaigns and their impacts, he will review, and in some cases contest, historical and political interpretations of these events. His arguments will engage sociological debates on the boundaries between civil resistance movements and engagement in institutional politics and include a set of conclusions on strategies for peace and disarmament action.

Register to attend the lecture and reception.

About the Speaker

David Cortright is professor emeritus of the practice at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Previously, Cortright was the director of policy studies at the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and director of the institute’s Peace Accords Matrix project, the largest existing collection of implementation data on intrastate peace agreements.

Cortright has written widely about nonviolent social change, nuclear disarmament, and the use of multilateral sanctions and incentives as tools of international peacemaking. He has provided research services to the foreign ministries of Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, and has served as consultant or advisor to 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.

Hosts and Sponsors

This event is a University Lecture hosted by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.