Thant Myint-U
Senior Advisor on Asia
myint-u@ipinst.org
Mr. Thant Myint-U is a Senior Advisor on Asia at IPI and leads research and other efforts related to UN Secretariat reform, post-conflict peacebuilding, mediation as well the strengthening of partnerships in the Asia Pacific region. He is presently also a Research Associate of the Cambridge Centre for History and Economics and a senior advisor to the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum of the Social Science Research Council.
Prior to joining IPI in April 2006, he was a senior political officer in the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General. From 2004-5 he was the head of the Policy Planning Unit in the UN’s Department of Political Affairs and a member of the secretariat of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. He has served on three UN peacekeeping operations, in Cambodia (1992-3) and in the former Yugoslavia (1994-6) and with the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (2000-2003). From 1996-1999 he was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge where he taught Asian history and the history of the British empire.
He was educated at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and completed his PhD in modern history at Cambridge in 1996.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:- The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge University Press 2000)
- The River of Lost Footsteps (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2006)