Ambassador Cameron Munter (ret.)

Cameron Munter (@MunterCameron) is a retired U.S. career diplomat whose final assignment was ambassador to Pakistan. He taught at Pomona College and Columbia Law School, and was president of the EastWest Institute, engaging in international conflict mediation. He is currently on the board of advisors of Just Security as well as other corporate and nonprofit organizations. He lives in Prague, where he consults globally.

Cameron Munter joined the faculty of Pomona College in Claremont, California as professor of practice in international relations in January 2013.  He came to Pomona from Columbia University Law School in New York, where he was visiting professor during the fall term of 2012.

Munter served as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer for nearly three decades before his retirement in fall 2012.  He was Ambassador to Pakistan 2010-2012, guiding U.S.-Pakistani relations through a period of severe crisis (including the operation against Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad) while leading a 2500-employee embassy. He was Ambassador to Serbia 2007-2009, where he negotiated Serbia domestic consensus for 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 as Deputy Chief of Mission in Baghdad in 2010.  Previous overseas postings included Deputy Chief of Mission in Poland and in the Czech Republic.  He held a number of posts in Washington, including Director for Central Europe at the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Bush, and Chief of Staff of the NATO Enlargement Ratification Office at the Department of State.

Secretary Hillary Clinton awarded him with the State Department’s Distinguished Service Award in 2012.  He earned four State Department Superior Honor Awards and seven Senior Performance Pay awards.  His is the recipient of the Gold Medal of the Polish Army and the Czech Republic’s Masaryk Medal, and received an honorary degree from Pomona College in 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 Ithaca, New York, in 1976 and earned a doctoral degree in modern European history from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 1983.  He also studied at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland; the University of Freiburg, Germany; and, as the recipient of a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) stipend, at the University of Marburg in Germany.  In 1991 he was a Rusk Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. 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.