Gunnar Jarring

Gunnar Valfrid Jarring (12 October 1907 – 29 May 2002) was a Swedish diplomat and Turkologist.

Jarring was born in Brunnby, Höganäs Municipality, Skåne County (then part of Malmöhus County), Sweden. He earned a Ph.D. from Lund University in 1933 with his dissertation Studien zu einer osttürkischen Lautlehre ("Studies in Eastern Turkic Phonology"). He taught Turkic languages at the university for the rest of the 1930s.

Jarring entered the Swedish diplomatic service and worked for the Swedish foreign service as attaché at their embassy in Ankara in 1940. He later held diplomatic positions in Teheran, Baghdad, and Addis Ababa, and was appointed Swedish minister to India in 1948, and then minister to Pakistan. After several other diplomatic missions, he was Sweden's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1956 to 1958, and sat in the Security Council for the last two of those years. He was ambassador to the United States from 1958 to 1964, and to the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1973. In that capacity he signed on behalf of his country on the Outer Space Treaty in January 1967.