Charles F. Dunbar, now retired, was the Warburg Professor in International Relations at Simmons College. From 1993 to 2000, he was President of the Cleveland Council on World Affairs, and taught at Case Western Reserve University. In 1998, at the request of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, he took leave from the Council to serve as Annan’s Special Representative in the Western Sahara. There he ran a 500-person $60 million-a-year peacekeeping effort and aimed at conducting a referendum to determine whether Western Sahara would become independent or be made part of Morocco.

From 1962 until 1993, Charles F. Dunbar was a State Department Officer, including postings as Ambassador to Yemen and Qatar. Between 1981 and 1983, during the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan, he was Chargé d’Affaires at the American Embassy in Kabul, and from 1985 to 1988 he developed and administered a strategy for helping the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance to enhance its internal and international political standing. He has also been posted to Iran, Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania. Ambassador Dunbar holds an AB from Harvard and an MA in International Relations from Columbia. He speaks French, Persian (Farsi) and Arabic, and has published scholarly and “op-ed” articles on Yemen, Afghanistan, Western Sahara, and other topics