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 Ambassador
John W. McDonald is a lawyer, diplomat, former international civil servant,
development expert and peacebuilder, concerned about world social, economic and
ethnic problems. He spent twenty years of his career in Western Europe and the
Middle East and worked for sixteen years on United Nations economic and social
affairs. He is currently Chairman and co-founder of the Institute for
Multi-Track Diplomacy, in Washington D.C., which focuses on national and
international ethnic conflicts. In February, 1992, he was named Distinguished
Visiting Professor at George Mason University's Institute for Conflict Analysis
and Resolution, in Fairfax, Virginia.
McDonald
retired from the Foreign Service in 1987, after 40 years as a diplomat. In
1987-88, he became a Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law
School in Washington, DC He was Senior Advisor to George Mason University's
Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution and taught and lectured at the
Foreign Service Institute and the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs. From
December, 1988, to January, 1992, McDonald was President of the Iowa Peace
Institute in Grinnell, Iowa and was a Professor of Political Science at Grinnell
College.
In 1983,
Ambassador McDonald joined the State Department's newly formed Center for the
Study of Foreign Affairs as its Coordinator for Multilateral Affairs, and
lectured and organized symposia on the art of negotiation, multilateral
diplomacy and international organizations. He has written or edited eight books
on negotiation and conflict resolution.
From
1978-83, he carried out a wide variety of assignments for the State Department
in the area of multilateral diplomacy. He was President of the INTELSAT World
Conference called to draft a treaty on privileges and immunities; leader of the
US Delegation to the UN World Conference on Technical Cooperation Among
Developing Countries, in Buenos Aires in 1978; Secretary General of the 27th
Colombo Plan Ministerial Meeting; head of the US Delegation which negotiated a
UN Treaty Against the Taking of Hostages; US Coordinator for the UN Decade on
Drinking Water and Sanitation; head of the US Delegation to UNIDO III in New
Delhi in 1980; Chairman of the Federal Inter-Agency Committee for the UN's
International Year of Disabled Persons, 1981; US Coordinator and head of the US
Delegation for the UN's World Assembly on Aging, in Vienna, in 1982.
From
1974-78, he was Deputy Director General of the International Labor Organization
(ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland, a UN Agency, with responsibility for managing that
agency's 3,200 person Secretariat, coming from 102 countries, with programs in
120 member nations, and an annual budget of $135 million.
Department
assignments in Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn, Paris, Washington DC, Ankara, Tehran,
Karachi, and Cairo.
Ambassador
McDonald holds both a B.A. and a J.D. degree from the University of Illinois,
and graduated from the National War College in 1967. He was appointed Ambassador
twice by President Carter and twice by President Reagan to represent the United
States at various UN World Conferences.
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