George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. That book, which traced America's entry into the Iraq war and the subsequent troubled occupation, won the Overseas Press Club's 2005 Cornelius Ryan Award and the Helen Bernstein Book Award of the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the 2005.

Betrayed
"In early 2007, George Packer published an article in The New Yorker about Iraqi interpreters who jeopardized their lives on behalf of the Americans in Iraq, with little or no U.S. protection or security. The article drew national attention to the humanitarian crisis and moral scandal. Betrayed, based on Mr. Packer's interviews in Baghdad, tells the story of three young Iraqis - two men and one woman - motivated to risk everything by America's promise of freedom. Betrayed explores the complex relationships among the Iraqis themselves, and with their American supervisor, struggling to find purpose while a country collapses around them." (coultureproject.org, where Betrayed had it's world premiere in January 2008.)

The play is directed by Rush Rehm, an actor, director, and professor of drama and of classics who publishes in the areas of Greek tragedy and contemporary politics. Along with courses on ancient theater and culture, he teaches courses on contemporary politics, the media, and U.S. imperialism. Rehm also directs and acts professionally, serving as Artistic Director of Stanford Summer Theater (SST). An activist in the peace and justice movements, Rehm is involved in anti-war and anti-imperialist actions, and in solidarity campaigns with Palestine, Cuba, East Timor, and Central America.

On Thursday, May 19, Packer will be in conversation with Tobias Wolff (English, Stanford) and Debra Satz (Philosophy, Stanford).

For more information, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War Series website

Aila M. Matanock is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford.  Her current research is on bringing militant groups into elections in conflicted states and, more broadly, on effective governance for minimizing conflict.  She is currently compiling an observational dataset on militant groups worldwide, while also conducting survey experiments, primarily in Colombia.  Before coming to Stanford, she was employed by the RAND Corporation to conduct research on terrorism and proliferation.  She received an undergraduate degree magna cum laude in Social Studies from Harvard University, and also worked with the Belfer Center's Managing the Atom Project and with the Los Alamos National Laboratory during that time.

Matthias Englert is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. Before joining CISAC in 2009, he was a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Group Science Technology and Security (IANUS) and a PhD student at the department of physics at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.

His major research interests include nonproliferation, disarmament, arms control, nuclear postures and warheads, fissile material and production technologies, the civil use of nuclear power and its role in future energy scenarios and the possibility of nuclear terrorism. His research during his stay at CISAC focuses primarily on the technology of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, the implications of their use for the nonproliferation regime, and on technical and political measures to manage proliferation risks.

Englert has participated in projects investigating technical aspects of the concept of proliferation resistance with topics including the conversion of research reactors, uranium enrichment with gas centrifuges, reducing plutonium stockpiles with reactor-based options,  spallation neutron sources and fusion power plants. Additional research topics have included fissile material stockpiles, fuel-cycles and accelerator driven systems.

Although a substantial part of his professional work recently has been technical he is equally interested in and actively studies the historical, social and political aspects of the use of nuclear technologies. Research interests include the dispute about Article IV of the NPT, the future development of the NPT regime, possibilities for a nuclear weapons-free world, preventive arms control, and the history and development of proliferation relevant programs. By studying contemporary theory in philosophy through the interaction of science, technology and society, Englert has acquired analytical tools to reflect on approaches describing or addressing the problem of ambivalent technology.

Englert is a vice speaker of the working group Physics and Disarmament of the German Physical Society (DPG) and a board member of the  German Research Association for Science, Disarmament and Security (FONAS).

Brenna Marea Powell is a 7th year PhD candidate in the department of Government at Harvard University, and a doctoral fellow at the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. She received her AB from Stanford in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research interests include inequality, civil conflict and political violence in divided societies. Her three-article dissertation research explores the role of political institutions in redefining ethno-racial boundaries and social hierarchy. This includes work on post-conflict policing in Northern Ireland, racial policy in Brazil, and the politics of ethno-racial classification in the United States.

About the Speaker: Kaitlin Shilling has spent most of her career working in the non-governmental sector in post-crisis development. At Stanford, she now researches post-crisis reconstruction with a focus on incorporating natural resource management into program design. Before beginning her PhD at Stanford, Shilling spent over a year and a half working for DAI, a development consulting company, on two USAID-funded projects in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. She began as the Director of Finance and Operations for the Afghanistan Immediate Needs Project, and then moved to the Alternative Livelihoods Project to run the Gender and Micro-Enterprise Department. Her work on both of these projects involved collaborating with other NGOs, donors, and UN agencies working in the region. Before moving to Afghanistan, Shilling worked in the home office of DAI for almost two years in the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group. As part of the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group, she worked on projects in Indonesia, East Timor, and Liberia.

Before moving to Afghanistan, Ms. Shilling worked in the home office of DAI for almost two years in the Crisis Mitigation and Recovery Group at DAI. Ms. Shilling's work included projects in Indonesia, East Timor, and Liberia, in addition to writing proposals to win new business. While at Stanford, Kaitlin will pursue research relating to post-crisis reconstruction with a focus on incorporating natural resource management into program design

Hein Goemans received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1995 and currently serves as Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester in New York. 

His book War and Punishment was published by Princeton University Press in 2000. Another book, Leaders and International Conflict (co-authored with Giacomo Chiozza) is forthcoming by Cambridge University Press. Other publications have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. 

Goemans is currently engaged in two research projects. The first extends the research in his first book on the causes of war termination and examines the role and incentives of leaders in international conflict initiation. This seminar will draw on his work for his second research project, which explores when and why people become attached to specific pieces of territory that together constitute a "homeland" and the consequences of these attachments.