November 16, 2011 Contemporary Diplomacy Panel at Kluge Center, Dec. 1

How is diplomacy changing? What can diplomats do to prevent or resolve conflict, initiate or manage change? These questions will be addressed in a conversation among four distinguished experts who bring real-world experience from the United Nations, Latin America, the United Kingdom and the religious field.

The event, “Contemporary Diplomacy,” will take place at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 1, in Room 119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the panel discussion is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are needed.

Participants include Ambassador Álvaro de Soto, Ambassador Ricardo Luna, Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, Alexander Evans and Vanni Pettina.

De Soto is a Peruvian diplomat and renowned international mediator. He led the negotiations which brought an end to the war in El Salvador. He has also served as the political adviser to Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali; the special adviser on Cyprus; and the special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. He was the United Nations undersecretary-general from 1999 to 2007.

Luna is the former Peruvian ambassador to the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Nations. Currently, he is a distinguished visiting scholar at the Kluge Center. Luna served as Peru’s ambassador to the United States from 1992 to 1999. He participated in peace talks that in 1998 resulted in an agreement ending decades-long friction and periodic conflicts between Peru and Ecuador. From 1989 to 1992, Luna was ambassador to the United Nations. From 2006 to 2010, he was ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, London. Luna has taught international relations at Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Tufts universities.

McCarrick is archbishop emeritus of Washington and a distinguished visiting scholar at the Kluge Center. McCarrick served as archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington from 2001 to 2006. He was elevated to the College of Cardinals by Pope John Paul II just seven weeks after his installation as archbishop. In 1996, McCarrick was invited to serve on the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, and from 1999-201 he was a member of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom.

Evans holds the Henry Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Kluge Center and is a counselor in the British diplomatic service. As a diplomat, he has served in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. From 2009-2011, he was a senior adviser to the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, first the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and then Marc Grossman. Evans has held fellowships at Oxford and Yale universities.

Pettina, who will serve as moderator of the panel, is a fellow at the Kluge Center, researching “From the Nationalist Compromise to the Insurrection: Cuba and the United States, 1933-1959.” He is an associate researcher at the Jóse Ortega y Gasset Research Institute in Madrid and the LSE Ideas Center in London. Pettina is the author of several articles on U.S. foreign policy concerning Latin America during the early Cold War.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world’s best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another, to distill wisdom from the Library’s rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.