Program archives

Mr. E. Wayne Merry is a Senior Associate at the American Foreign Policy Council, a private educational foundation in Washington established in 1982. He is a Russia Country Specialist for Amnesty International/USA and serves on the board of directors of the Kolodzei Art Foundation and the Center for Realistic Foreign Policy Studies. From 1999-2000 he served as Director of the Program on European Societies in Transition at the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington and later was a non-resident Senior Fellow there. He also served as a Senior Fellow at the Lester Pearson Peacekeeping Center in Nova Scotia.

Mr. Merry served for twenty-six years in the United States Foreign Service and spent six of those years in Moscow as a specialist in Soviet and Russian politics. He later joined the staff of Secretary of Defense Perry as Regional Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia to develop defense relations with the states of the former Soviet Union. Before retiring from the Foreign Service, he was Senior Advisor to the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

He has served as a board member for the following organizations: International Center for Peace in the Middle East, Americans for Peace Now, Institute of World Affairs, Middle East Policy Council (national advisory committee), and was Chairman for the Fund for Investigative Journalism from 1969-1979. Professional memberships include PEN, Authors Guild, Washington Independent Writers, Society of Professional Journalists, National Writers Union, Middle East Institute (senior scholar), and the Council of Foreign Relations.

He has written for a large variety of newspapers and journals and is the author of Russia and China in Asia: Changing Great Power Roles (AFPC, 2002), Politics of Central Asia: National in Form, Soviet in Content in "In the Tracks of Tamerlane" (NDU, 2004), and Passing the Baton in the Balkans in "Exiting the Balkan Thicket" (CATO, 2001). Mr. Merry has been interviewed on many national and international radio and television programs and has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad.

He attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison (B.A. 1970), Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (M.P.A. 1972), and the U.S. Army Russian Institute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1990-1991).