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Ambassador John W. McDonald

Ambassador John W. McDonald is a lawyer, diplomat, former international civil servant, development expert and peacebuilder, concerned with global social, economic and ethnic problems. He spent twenty years of his career in Western Europe and the Middle East and worked for sixteen years on United Nations economic and social affairs. He is Chairman and co-founder of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy in Washington D.C., which focuses on national and inter-national ethnic conflicts. 

Ambassador McDonald has held State Department assignments in Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn, Paris, Washington D.C., Ankara, Tehran, Karachi, and Cairo. From 1974-78, he was Deputy Director General of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland and later carried out a wide variety of assignments for the State Department in the area of multilateral diplomacy. In 1983, Ambassador McDonald joined the State Department’s Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs as its Coordinator for Multilateral Affairs before retiring from the Foreign Service in 1987 to pursue academic teaching.