The Morris Janowitz Career Achievement Award

The Morris Janowitz Career Achievement Award is awarded by the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society to a limited number of senior scholars whose careers most demonstrate excellence in the study of armed forces and society and important service to the discipline. Perhaps the criteria for the award are best described by the careers of the outstanding scholars chosen to receive it to date.

Morris Janowitz Biography

 

2023 Recipients

Brenda L. Moore

Brenda L. Moore has been an active member of the IUS since 1987, including as organizer, discussant, and presenter at the biennial conferences; as the Chair of the Student Paper Award Committee; as a member of the IUS Council; and as a member of the Board of Editors of the IUS journal, Armed Forces & Society. She currently serves as IUS secretary. She has also served on several Federal Advisory Boards as a subject expert on active-duty service women, and military veterans; and was appointed by President Clinton to serve on the American Battle Monuments Commission (1994-1997).

Moore earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1987; and is an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). She is Editor of Special Issue on Women in the Military: Armed Forces and Society 43 (2): 191-392. She is author of the books: To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American WACs Stationed Overseas During World War II; and Serving Our Country: Japanese American Women in the Military during World War II; and has published several scholarly articles analyzing survey data on women and minorities in the military. Her book, To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race was the first comprehensive study of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion (an all-Black Female unit that served in the Army during World War II). The book is recognized as foundational for current projects on the unit and was heavily referenced during the petition which resulted in the unit being awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2022.

Pascal Vennesson

Pascal Vennesson is Senior Fellow and Head of Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Professor of Political Science at Paris-Pantheon-Assas University (on leave). His research and teaching lie at the intersection of the fields of international relations and strategic studies. Before joining RSIS, he held the Chair “Security in Europe”, at the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies. He lectures at the Goh Keng Swee Command and Staff College and is a regular guest speaker embarked on French Navy warships for the annual operational mission 'Joan of Arc.' An award-winning teacher, Professor Vennesson supervised or co-supervised more than twenty-five PhD dissertations in international security and military sociology. He is the author, co-author and editor of six books and his refereed articles have been notably published in Armed Forces and Society, International Relations, Journal of Strategic Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies, Review of International Studies, Revue Française de Science Politique and Security Studies. He is a member of the editorial boards of Revue Française de Science Politique (French Political Science Review), Armed Forces and Society and the European Journal of International Security. A Council Member of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society (IUS), he serves as Commander Senior Grade in the French Navy Citizen Reserve.

Professor Vennesson was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Arms Control, at Ohio State University’s Mershon Center and a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research) Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He received his MA from the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and his Ph.D. from Sciences-Po Paris.

2021 Recipients

Peter D. Feaver

Peter D. Feaver (Ph.D., Harvard, 1990) is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University.  He is Director of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy. Feaver is author of Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Harvard Press, 2003) and of Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Cornell University Press, 1992). He is co-author: with Christopher Gelpi and Jason Reifler, of Paying the Human Costs of War (Princeton Press, 2009); with Susan Wasiolek and Anne Crossman, of Getting the Best Out of College (Ten Speed Press, 2008, 2nd edition 2012); and with Christopher Gelpi, of Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton Press, 2004). He is co-editor, with Richard H. Kohn, of Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (MIT Press, 2001).  He has published numerous other monographs, scholarly articles, book chapters, and policy pieces on grand strategy, American foreign policy, public opinion, nuclear proliferation, civil-military relations, and cybersecurity.

From June 2005 to July 2007, Feaver served as Special Advisor for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council Staff at the White House where his responsibilities included the national security strategy, regional strategy reviews, and other political-military issues. In 1993-94, Feaver served as Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control on the National Security Council at the White House where his responsibilities included the national security strategy review, counterproliferation policy, regional nuclear arms control, and other defense policy issues.  He is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and is a contributor to “Shadow Government” at ForeignPolicy.com.

Yagil Levy

Yagil Levy is a professor of political sociology and public policy at the Open University of Israel. He was born in Tel Aviv and spent 12 years in the Israel Defense Forces, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
Yagil earned his B.A and Ph.D. degrees in Political Science from Tel Aviv University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at The New School for Social Research, New York. Subsequently he served as City Manger of the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Ramla and later in other managerial and advisory roles. Yagil joined the Open University of Israel as a faculty member in 2008, where he founded the MA program in Government and Public Policy and the Local Government School.

Yagil's fields of study have encompassed the affinity between military polices and social structure in Israel, changes in the social composition of the IDF, civilian control, casualty sensitivity, military-religious relations, recruitment policies, and the legitimacy of using force. He has published eight books, four of them in English, in addition to a coauthored book, textbook, six edited volumes and over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His most recent book, Whose Life Is Worth More? Hierarchies of Risk and Death in Contemporary Wars, has been published by Stanford University Press in 2019. He held visiting posts at the Georgetown University and the European University Institute. Yagil served as President of The European Research Group on Military and Society (ERGOMAS), Vice President of the Israeli Sociological Society, and also serves on the board of editors of Armed Forces & Society and Res Militaris- European Journal of Military Studies, and as the IUS council member. Yagil also regularly publishes op-ed articles in Ha'aretz newspaper.

2019 Recipients

Michel Louis Martin

Michel Louis Martin (MA in African studies UCLA, Doctorate in Law and Political science University of Bordeaux, Fulbright and Ford Foundations fellow UCLA, University of Chicago) is emeritus professor of Law and Political science at the University Toulouse 1-Capitole ; he teaches as adjunct-professor at the Catholic University of Toulouse and, as visiting professor, at Beyrouth St-Joseph University. He is the author, in French and English, of numerous books and articles in the area of civil-military relations, international security, and comparative government and constitutional law, covering Africa, France and Europe, with attention to other areas ; he is also translator into French of classical works in political sociology.

He was guest-scholar for many years at the University of Chicago, professor at the universities of the French West Indies and the Institute of Political Science and the University of Toulouse where he directed the Research Center on Security and Governance and the graduate and post-graduate programs in International relations and Security policy. He also taught in China, Vietnam, Senegal, Morroco, and Mexico. He was also the Director of the Confucius Institute of Toulouse. He was chief-editor of
the Annales de l’Université Toulouse-Capitole and held several editorial and academic positions.

He is chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and member of Académie des sciences, Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres of Toulouse.

Wilbur J. Scott

Wilbur Scott was trained at Louisiana State University in the eclectic tradition of political sociology developed there by the German émigré and scholar, Rudolf Heberle. Scott’s 1976 dissertation accounted for the stunning election of New Orleans’ first black mayor in 1972, just seven years after the Voting Rights Act enfranchised African-Americans. Over the next ten years at the University of Oklahoma, Scott published astute analyses of many other elections and political controversies.

Scott’s subsequent work may be best described as that of a sociologist making sense of his own experiences as an infantry platoon leader in Vietnam and veteran thereafter. The first phase culminated in a ground-breaking work, The Politics of Readjustment. This 1993 book has been hailed as a definitive treatise on the sociology of veterans’ issues. In 1995, he and Sandra Carson Stanley published an especially timely volume, Gays and Lesbians in the Military, addressing the U.S. military’s newly adopted Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.

In 2004 Scott moved to the U.S. Air Force Academy, first as Distinguished Visiting Professor, then Resident Sociologist. His research expanded to include leader decision-making in complex socio-cultural war environments and the sociologies of irregular warfare and remotely-piloted aircraft. His courses developed a popular following at USAFA among cadets, especially his Sociology of Violence and War.

In military sociology, Scott has more than 60 refereed articles, book chapters, and invited presentations. Scott and co-authors Karin De Angelis and David Segal currently are completing the book, Sociology through the Prism of Military Sociology.

Scott is now Professor Emeritus, both at the University of Oklahoma and the U.S. Air Force Academy.

He and his wife, Carol, live in downtown Colorado Springs.

2017 Recipients

René Moelker

René Moelker received his master’s degree in sociology from the Catholic University in Brabant in 1986 and his doctorate from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam in 1992. He served for two years on the faculty of the Netherlands Naval Academy. In 1994, he was appointed to and currently serves on the faculty of the Netherlands Defense Academy, where he has proven to be a leader in teaching and research, both within his institution and within the wider profession of military sociologists.

Moelker is a prolific scholar. He has over 100 publications, including most recently over ten books or edited books and over twenty book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. These publications cover a wide-range of substantive matters dealing amongst others with the theory and methods of military sociology, with military organization and moral responsibility for the use of force, and with the effects of military service on military families. The main question that he addresses asks how military force can be used responsibly, to care for the lives and wellbeing of soldiers, veterans, and civilians caught up in the experience of collective violence. His current work is a comparative ethnographic study of veterans in the USA and the Netherlands.

In addition, Rene contributes to build the professional organizations on which we depend to do our work. He is a member of the Council of IUS and a member of the editorial board of our journal Armed Forces and Society. He has served as the acting president of the European Research Group on Military and Society (ERGOMAS), is currently treasurer of ERGOMAS, and secretary of its working group on military families. He also sits on the editorial board of Res Militares.

Patricia Shields

Pat Shields received her bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Maryland in 1973. She continued with graduate studies at The Ohio State University where she earned her master’s degree in economics (1975) and her PhD in public administration (1977). In 1978, she joined and remained a loyal member of the Department of the Department of Political Science at Texas State University. Over the course of her career she has distinguished herself as a teacher and a scholar within her university, nationally and internationally.

Pat has proven to be a prolific scholar having published four books and over sixty book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. More important than the numbers of publications is the quality of her work and its influence. She has focused her research on civil-military relations, beginning with an examination of equity issues affecting the recruitment of youth into the (then) new all-volunteer force. She has since broadened her horizon to include studies of gender integration, peacekeeping and peace studies, and military privatization. While making her mark in military studies, she has also developed a lively interest in the importance of classical philosophical pragmatism as a theoretical perspective helpful for the study public administration. This work has led her also to studies Jane Addams and her contributions to peace studies.

We must not forget her role as a teacher. For eighteen years, she served with distinction as the director of the Masters of Publication Administration at Texas State University. A great many of her students won national awards for the quality of their papers. On the international scale, Pat has served as the editor-in chief of our journal, Armed Forces & Society since 2001. Her close attention even to the submissions she rejects has won her the thanks and admiration of submitters from all around the world. In addition to this work, she has served on the editorial boards.

Not surprising, she received the Rita Mae Kelly Award for her contributions to gender studies, from the section for women in public administration of the American Society for Public Administration. She also received the Leslie A. Whittington Award for teaching and methods from The National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration. We are happy to add to her collection tonight.

2015 Recipients

Don M. Snider

Commissioned from West Point in 1962, Don M. Snider has served the Republic for over five decades as both Soldier and scholar. As a Soldier he served three combat tours in Vietnam. After battalion command, he specialized in strategy and defense policy as Chief of Plans for Theater Army, Europe; Joint Planner for the Army Chief of Staff; and, Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution. In 1987 he joined the staff of the National Security Council in the White House as Director, Defense Policy, serving in both the Reagan and Bush Administrations. In his final active duty position he served in the Office of the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, retiring in 1990. Since then as a scholar, Snider has led the renewal of the study of military profession and ethics within the Army and, more recently, our other services. Among his academic accomplishments, he edited and contributed to three important books on the Army Profession and its civil-military relations, and published numerous articles in respected military and academic journals. He served for many years on the faculty at West Point, retiring with the rank of Professor Emeritus. He then joined the faculty at the Army War College as Professor of the Army Profession, and currently serves also as a senior fellow at the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic (CAPE). There he helped lead a two-year effort to produce the first-ever Army doctrine on the profession (ADRP-1, The Army Profession, 2013). Subsequently, he led another such effort that redefined the Army’s Ethic. He has also been a member of the IUS Council for many years.

Snider holds a doctorate in Public Policy from the University of Maryland (1993). He and Caroline, his Army wife of fifty years, reside in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Joseph Soeters

Joseph Soeters holds the chair of management and organization studies on the Faculty of Military Studies at the Netherlands Defense Academy. From 1999 to 2003 he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Military Studies at the academy. In addition, he serves as a part-time professor of organizational sociology at Tilburg University. For many years, he has been an associate editor of the IUS journal, Armed Forces & Society. He served as the vice-president of the Research Committee on Armed Forces and Conflict Resolution (RC01) within the International Sociological Association. Currently he is a member of its board.

Soeters is known to be an enthusiastic and effective teacher at the undergraduate and graduate levels. For instance, he has supervised over thirty PhD dissertations, most on military topics, with more to come. He is also a prolific researcher. He has written a book on Ethnic Conflict and Terrorism and co-edited ten books, most recently a Handbook on Research Methods in Military Studies. He has authored or co-authored about 70 articles in international academic journals, and published a large number of international book chapters. His research interests are wide ranging. He is particularly interested in showing how military cultures and operational styles affect military capacities to prevent, contain and resolve large-scale violent conflict. The overarching theme guiding his work is about whether violence solves problems. His approach is realistic and pragmatic, historical and comparative. He doubts there are simple, black and white, answers to such a question. Rather, he expects there are many shades of grey which it is the business of military studies both to identify and explain.

Joseph is married to Vivian Schreurs. Together they have three children and one granddaughter.

2013 Recipients