Non-Resident Senior Fellow
Thant Myint-U is an award-winning author, historian, conservationist, and international public servant. He was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and taught history from 1996 to 2000 as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has served on three United Nations peacekeeping operations, in Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia (1992-1996), and with the UN Secretariat in New York (2000-2006), including in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General and as the Chief of Policy Planning in the Department of Political Affairs. From 2009-2021, he lived and worked in Myanmar, as a presidential adviser, special adviser to the government on peacebuilding, founding chairman of the Yangon Heritage Trust, and as the chairman of U Thant House. A recipient of the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian honor, he is currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Christ’s College, Cambridge, a senior adviser to the World Bank, and UN special adviser on humanitarian diplomacy. He is the author of four books; his most recent, The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of the Democracy in the 21st Century was selected a New York Times Critics’ Top Pick (2019) and a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2020. His next book, Peacemaker, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2025.
