Jon Western

Jon Western is Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty at Mount Holyoke College where he is also the Carol Hoffmann Collins '63 Professor of International Studies and Five College Professor of International Relations.

He received his B.A. from Macalester College, his M.P.P. from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has taught at Columbia University and George Washington University and worked at the United States Institute of Peace. His teaching and research interests focus on human rights, human security, and the prevention of mass atrocity violence. He is the chair of a major international working group examining global trends in war, conflict, and political violence. Western is a former permanent contributor to The Duck of Minerva, a blog focused on International Relations.

Jon Western was a Balkans and East European specialist in the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1992, when hostilities broke out in the Bosnian War. Western and colleagues from the State Department and CIA found substantial, corroborated evidence of war crimes (including ethnic cleansing) committed by parties to the conflict, but were unable to convince their superiors to alter U.S. policy toward the war and its belligerents.

As a result, Western resigned on August 6, 1993. This was one week after Marshall Freeman Harris, the State Department's "chief specialist on Bosnia" had resigned, and was followed on August 23 by the resignation of the desk officer for Croatia, Stephen Walker. George Kenney, the acting Yugoslav desk officer, had resigned one year before, on August 25, 1992, in protest against the U.S. government's "ineffective, indeed counterproductive, handling of the Yugoslav crisis."

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