Thursday, October 11, 2018
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM
Chung-wen Shih Conference Room, Suite 503
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW Washington, DC 20052
About the Event:
The Research Initiative on Multination States and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies would like to invite you to a discussion with Professor Michael van Walt van Praag about the topic, “The Past in Asia’s Present: Rethinking Inner and East Asian International Relations.”
This event is free and open to the public.
About the Speaker:
Michael van Walt is a mediator and advisor in intrastate peace processes, an advocate for rights of peoples and minorities and a professor of international law and international relations. He has made his passion for the need to alleviate suffering caused by injustice, violent conflict and oppression his life-long career.
Michael has facilitated peace processes and advised parties engaged in such processes in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific and the Caucasus. He is an international lawyer by training and served as UN Senior Legal Advisor to the Foreign Minister of East Timor, Dr. Jose Ramos Horta, during the country’s transition to independence as part of UNTAET. He was appointed Visiting Professor of Modern International Relations and International Law at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he served on the faculty of the School for Historical Studies from 2011-2015. From 1991 to 1998 Michael served as General Secretary of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, headquartered in The Hague. Previously he practiced law, including public international law, with the law offices of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington D.C. and London (now known as Wilmer-Hale) and of Pettit & Martin in San Francisco.
Michael graduated in law from the University of Utrecht, where he also obtained his doctoral degree in Public International Law, and he has held visiting teaching and research positions at Stanford, UCLA, Indiana, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Golden Gate University School of Law, and the Università di Roma Sapienza. He has authored and edited books and articles on a variety of topics related to intrastate conflict and to relations of peoples and minorities with states, including Mobilizing Knowledge for Post-Conflict Development at the Local Level (The Hague: RAWOO 2000); The Implementation of the Right to Self-Determination as a Contribution to Conflict Prevention (Barcelona: UNESCO Division of Human Rights, Democracy and Peace/UNESCO Centre of Catalonia 1999); ‘The Memorandum on Genuine Autonomy for the Tibetan People: an explanatory introduction to the Tibetan proposal’ in Multinational Integration, Cultural Identity and Regional Self-Government: Comparative Experiences for Tibet (R. Toniatti and J. Woelk eds., London: Routledge 2014).
