John Edwin Mroz

John Edwin Mroz (May 1, 1948 – August 15, 2014) was the founder, president, and CEO of the EastWest Institute, best known for his diplomatic efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mroz was born on May 1, 1948 in Lowell, Massachusetts. He grew up in nearby Westfield, Massachusetts, where his father was a dentist. He completed his BA at the University of Notre Dame, followed by an MA at Northeastern University, and an MALD at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

In 1980 Mroz and Ira D. Wallach set out to address areas of political dispute across the Iron Curtain by forming the Institute for East West Security Studies (later renamed the EastWest Institute), an international not-for-profit, non-partisan "think and do" tank focusing on international conflict resolution through a variety of means, including track 2 diplomacy and track 1.5 diplomacy (conducted with the direct involvement of official actors), hosting international conferences, and authoring publications on international security issues.

In 1980 he published Beyond Security: Private Perceptions Among Arabs and Israelis, which examined the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

In 1981 the State Department under the Reagan Administration took the diplomatic initiative and established a secret contact with the PLO through Mroz, which was aborted after the start of the 1982 Lebanon War. The substance of the talks between Mroz and Yasser Arafat was PLO recognition of Israel in return for U.S. recognition of the PLO.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the institute changed its name to the EastWest Institute, and widened its focus, consulting with European governments on the reunification of Germany and other post-Communist challenges.

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