Personal Summary

Paul Gordon Lauren is Regents Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Mansfield Fellow.  He is the first person ever to be named as a Regents Professor at The University of Montana.  He is an internationally-recognized teacher and scholar on diplomacy, international relations, and human rights.  He served as the Founding Director of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center and as the Mansfield Professor of Ethics and Public Affairs.  He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University where he also has served on the faculty on three separate occasions.  At the University of Montana he has received the Distinguished Scholar Award, the Most Inspirational Teacher Award, the Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award, the Distinguished Service to International Education Award, the Pantzer Award for Fostering a Humane Learning Environment, the Montana Professor of the Year Award by the Carnegie Foundation and the U.S. Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, and the Governor's Humanities Award.

Professor Lauren actively publishes in four disciplines:  History, International Law, Political Science, and Philosophy.  He has published many articles, chapters, and fifteen books, all or portions of which have been translated into seven different languages, including the widely-read Force and Statecraft, the highly-acclaimed The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the award-winning Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination.   His publications, either in whole or in part, have been translated into seven different languages.  He has been elected into membership into the Norwegian Academy of Arts and Sciences and has delivered invited addresses at The Smithsonian Institution, the Nobel Peace Institute, and before the United Nations where he has been described as the world's leading authority on the history of international human rights.

He has lectured widely in Europe, North America, Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, and North Africa before a wide variety of audiences, including academic audiences of university professors and students, the general public, professional diplomats, military and intelligence officers, judges and attorneys, legislators, policy makers, and NGO activists. He has been a Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer, Senior Fulbright Scholar, a Senior Fulbright Specialist, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a National Peace Fellow, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellow, a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the U.S. Department of State.

Professor Lauren was heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States when he lived and worked in Harlem of New York City and personally met Martin Luther King, Jr.  His work in international human rights has taken him behind the Iron Curtain during the tense days of the Cold War, enabled him to observe part of the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague, and taken him to places when the dangers and sensitivity of the subject required that he be accompanied by armed bodyguards.

Field of Study

International Human Rights; Diplomacy; Modern International Relations; and Foreign Affairs

Selected Publications

Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Challenges of Our Time. 5th Ed.  (with Gordon A. Craig and Alexander George) New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.  3rd Ed., 2011.

Destinies Shared.  Boulder: Westview Press, 1989.

Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination.  Boulder: Westview Press, 1988.  2nd Ed., HarperCollins, 1996.

The China Hands Legacy: Ethics and Diplomacy.  Boulder: Westview Press, 1987.

Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory, and Policy.  New York: Free Press, 1979.

Diplomats and Bureaucrats.  Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1976.