Ambassador McDonald enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a diplomat and an international civil servant before devoting himself full time to peace-building activities and making a major theoretical and practical contribution to the development of this field. During his 40 years of work in the United States Foreign Service he worked in the Middle East and in Western Europe, as well as on United Nations development programs in New York and Geneva.
One of Ambassador McDonald’s last official 'postings' was to the State Department’s Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs, where he helped to organize the training of the next generation of diplomats, began a distinguished series of practical, short publications and, together with his colleague Joseph Montville, developed the idea of unofficial, “Second Track” diplomacy as an adjunct to official (Track One) level contacts between governments.
On his retirement from the Foreign Service, Ambassador McDonald became the President of the Iowa Peace Institute, taught at Grinnell College and with his long time colleague, Louise Diamond, produced the first version of their well known handbook on “Multi-Track Diplomacy,” which subsequently went through many printings by Kumarian Press. In 1992, he was invited to become Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Mason University’s then Institute (now School) for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, the academic center for which he had been long a senior advisor (and Advisory Board member) since its first tentative inception in 1982 under the direction of Dr. Bryant Wedge.
In 1982, John McDonald established the now well known Institute for Multi-track Diplomacy (IMTD) with its headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia and he has been Chairman and CEO of that growing organization ever since. In 2012 IMTD celebrated its 20th anniversary and looked back on a wide variety of projects that covered a spectrum of “tracks,” ranging from bridge building activities between India and Pakistan in Kashmir to cross-communal discussions - and sporting activities - on the island of Cyprus. In addition, over 200 interns from local university conflict and peace-building programs have spent time at the Institute as interns, learning about the practicalities of peace-building in a variety of challenging settings.
In addition to his institutional and field activities for IMTD, Ambassador McDonald has written or co-edited ten books and a large number of articles on negotiation, on effective activity at multilateral conferences and on the field of conflict resolution. In all of this, he himself has been an invaluable bridge between academia, non-governmental organizations, and the Track One world, where his multifaceted career began in the aftermath of World War II .
JB/CRM
