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John Feffer

John Feffer
Spring 1988 Fellow
Nuclear Times
John Feffer
Spring 1988 Fellow
Nuclear Times

Feffer will be a 2012-2013 Open Society Fellow, returning to Eastern Europe to look at the transitions there (he wrote a book on the subject in the late 1990s). He will interview leading thinkers, activists, and writers in Eastern Europe, many of whom he spoke to while the transitions were underway, to gauge lessons that may be applicable to other societies experiencing similar transformations. He became Director of the Global Affairs Program at the International Relations Center and co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus in June 2006.  He previously worked as a freelance writer and editor in Washington, DC.  He contributed an essay on U.S. government subsidies of the arms trade for a project sponsored by FAS and CDI.  He worked for three years for the American Friends Service Committee in Tokyo where he co-directed the East Asia Quaker International Affairs Program . He focused on two areas: conflict resolution and the arms trade.  He conducted a conflict resolution training program in South Korea.  He also worked closely with groups in Europe and Asia on the Asia-Europe Meeting process to get Europe-Asia arms trade issues higher on the agenda, and wrote booklet, Linking Arms, on this topic.  He worked extensively on peace and disarmament issues along with groups in Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan, and organizes regional exchanges.  He has also worked for the World Policy Institute. He wrote Progress on the Korean Peninsula? and North Korea Reaches Out which appeared  in Foreign Policy in Focus.  He coedited Europe’s New Nationalism ,which was published by Oxford University Press, and State of the Union: The Clinton Administration and the Nation in Profile, and wrote Shock Waves: Eastern Europe After the Revolutions and Beyond Detente: Soviet Foreign Policy and U.S. Options.

…Having an opportunity to be in DC and meet with policy makers was enormously instructive for me, not to mention professionally helpful. The work I did at Nuclear Times, particularly a long paper on alternative defense that became a chapter in my first book, helped me to shape my subsequent writing career enormously. Even though the Cold War is over, the need for arms control and disarmament specialists has never been greater. I’m glad to see that the Fellowship is still going strong!