David Cortright

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 is the author or co-editor of 23 books, including including "Protest and Policy in the Iraq, Nuclear Freeze and Vietnam Peace Movements" (Cambridge University Press Elements, 2025), "Civil Society, Peace and Power " (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and "Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict " (University of Chicago, 2015). He also is chair of the Board of the Fourth Freedom Forum. Cortright has a long history of public advocacy for disarmament and the prevention of war. As an active duty soldier during the Vietnam War, he spoke against that conflict. In 1978, Cortright was named executive director of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which under his leadership grew from 4,000 to 150,000 members and became the largest disarmament organization in the United States. He also was actively involved in the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s. In November 2002, he helped create Win Without War, a coalition of national organizations that opposed the invasion of Iraq and works for demilitarized national security strategies.