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Egyptian Revolution Offers Peace Lessons

Dr. David Cortright, director of policy studies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, will present a lecture, “Lessons from the Egyptian Revolution: The Power of Nonviolence,” at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 4, in the UALR Donaghey Student Center’s Ledbetter Hall B.

The lecture, sponsored by UALR Middle Eastern Studies and the Arkansas chapter of Women’s Action for New Directions, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Joshua Thomsen at 501-683-7028 or jcthomsen@ualr.edu.

Cortright is the author or editor of 17 books, most recently “Ending Obama’s War” and “Towards Nuclear Zero.” He also edits “Peace Policy,” Kroc’s online journal.

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 adviser 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.

Other recent works by Cortright include the 2nd edition of “Gandhi and Beyond: Nonviolence for a New Political Age,” “Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas,” and “Uniting Against Terror: Cooperative Nonmilitary Responses to the Global Terrorist Threat,” co-edited with George A. Lopez.

Over the past decade, Cortright and Lopez have written or co-edited a series of major works on multilateral sanctions, including “Smart Sanctions,”  “Sanctions and the Search for Security,” and “The Sanctions Decade.” Cortright also is editor of “The Price of Peace: Incentives and International Conflict Prevention.”

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 U.S. He also was actively involved in the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s. In 2002, he helped to create Win Without War, a coalition of national organizations opposing the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

After graduating with a B.A. in history from the University of Notre Dame, Cortright earned an M.A. degree in history from New York University. He completed doctoral studies in political science at the Union Institute in residence at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.