Amb. Cameron Munter

Amb. Cameron Munter is President and CEO of the EastWest Institute (EWI) in New York. The EastWest Institute works to reduce international conflict, addressing seemingly intractable problems that threaten world security and stability. He came to the EWI after a distinguished career in both diplomacy and academia. Ambassador Munter served as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer for nearly three decades and has served in some of the most conflict-ridden areas of the globe. He was Ambassador to Pakistan from 2010 to 2012, guiding U.S.-Pakistani relations through a period of crisis, including the operation against Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad. He was Ambassador to Serbia from 2007 until 2009, during which time he negotiated for Serbian domestic consensus on the question of European integration while managing the Kosovo independence crisis. He served twice in Iraq, leading the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mosul in 2006 and then handling political-military affairs in Baghdad from 2009 to 2010. Other overseas postings also include Deputy Chief of Mission in Poland (2002-2005) and in the Czech Republic (2005-2007), as well as numerous other assignments at the State Department and at Embassies overseas. In Washington, he was Director for Central Europe at the National Security Council (1999-2001), Executive Assistant to the Counselor of the Department of State (1998-1999), Director of the Northern European Initiative (1998), and Chief of Staff in the NATO Enlargement Ratification Office (1997-1998). After his retirement from the Foreign Service, Munter was Professor of International Relations at Pomona College in Claremont, California from 2013 to 2015, and served as a consultant to the equity funds KKR and Mid Europa Partners. He was a senior advisor to the Albright Stonebridge Group and advised the Gates Foundation project on polio eradication. He came to Pomona from Columbia University Law School in New York, where he was visiting professor during the fall term of 2012. He is a non-resident fellow of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. Ambassador Munter was born in California in 1954. He graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1976 and earned a doctoral degree in modern European history from the Johns Hopkins University in 1983. He was a Rusk Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in 1991. He taught European history at UCLA and directed European studies at the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Foundation) in New York before joining the Foreign Service.