Tom Farer has a long and successful career as a leader, scholar, and keen observer of the international scene. In his presentation he will step back a bit to put today’s turmoil in the U.S. and the Middle East into a broader context by examining the evolution of recent American foreign policy. He will conclude with a look into the future to speculate how this process may continue into the Trump era.
Farer is University Professor at the University of Denver, a position he assumed after serving for fourteen years (1996-2010) as Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He previously served as President of the University of New Mexico, President of the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, and President of the Association of Professional Schools of International Relations. He has taught law or international relations and foreign policy at Columbia, MIT, Rutgers, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Tulane, Princeton, American University and Cambridge University and has been Honorary Professor at Peking University. He has been a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment and The Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He has worked in the Department of State as special assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs and the Department of Defense as special assistant to the General Counsel. At the United Nations he served as legal advisor to the UN operation in Somalia where decades earlier he had served as law and karate instructor to the National Police force. He is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law and the Human Rights Quarterly and was co-editor of the journal Global Governance. He has published twelve books and monographs. His many articles have appeared in such journals as the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Human Rights Quarterly, and the American Journal of International Law.