War and Peace

New Thinking About the Causes of War and War Avoidance

Georgetown University Law Center

Guest Speakers

Spring 2009

Dr. Robert F. Turner

Robert F. Turner co-founded the Center for National Security Law in 1981. He has served as its Associate Director since then except for two periods of government service in the 1980s and during 1994-95 when he occupied the Charles H. Stockton Chair of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Turner is a former three-term chairman of both the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Law and National Security and the Committee on Executive- Congressional Relations of the ABA Section of International Law and Practice. He holds both professional and academic doctorates from the University of Virginia School of Law and is author or editor of more than a dozen books or monographs and numerous articles. He has testified before more than a dozen committees of Congress, has appeared on most of the major U.S. television networks, and has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, and numerous other newspapers in the United States and abroad.

Much of his professional life has been focused on issues of war and peace. Following two tours in Indochina as an Army officer attached to the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, he served as a Research Associate and Public Affairs Fellow at Stanford=s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He then spent five years as national security adviser to U.S. Senator Robert P. Griffin (R. Mich.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. He has also served as Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, as Counsel to the President=s Intelligence Oversight Board at the White House, as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs, and as the first President of the congressionally-established U.S. Institute of Peace. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and several other professional organizations