BRATTLEBORO — The Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) will host the former U.S. Ambassador to Belarus and Georgia, Kenneth S. Yalowitz, who will speak on Friday, Nov. 4 in Rotch Hall on the World Learning/SIT campus.
The focus of Yalowitz's presentation will be on the effects of WikiLeaks on the current conduct of U.S. diplomacy. He will cover what has been leaked and the positive and negative effects of those releases.
He will provide his conclusions on the impact of WikiLeaks on the future of U.S. foreign relations. He will also touch on the subject of corruption as it relates to his discussion of WikiLeaks.
Yalowitz, the director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, completed his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin and holds a Russian Institute Certificate, MA and Master of Philosophy degree from Columbia University. He retired from the State Department in 2001 after 36 years as career diplomat and member of the Senior Foreign Service.
He served twice as a U.S. ambassador: to the Republic of Belarus from 1994 to 1997; and to Georgia from 1998 to 2001. His other foreign assignments included two tours of duty in Moscow, as well as The Hague and the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels.
Yalowitz's domestic assignments have included country director for Australia-New Zealand affairs, deputy director for economics of the Office of Soviet Union Affairs, and congressional foreign affairs fellow.
He has won a variety of awards for conflict prevention and for overall diplomatic performance. He was chosen for the Ambassador Robert Frasure award for peacemaking and conflict prevention in 2000, for his work to prevent the spillover of the Chechen war into Georgia.
The free lecture will begin at 7:30 p.m., following coffee with the speaker at 7 p.m.
The Windham World Affairs Council of Vermont is part of the “World Affairs Councils of America” (WACA), the country's largest international affairs nonprofit organization, with 484,000 members and participants.
WWAC is an all-volunteer council and proudly offers all events free to the public.
For more information, contact Katie Wilson by email.