The Continuing Work of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs

Jorge I. Domínguez served as director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University from 1995 to 2005. Founded in 1958 by Robert Bowie and Henry Kissinger, the Center has seeded, supported, and produced outstanding scholarship on international and comparative topics.

At various times, the Center also housed three people who went on to win Nobel Prizes: Thomas Schelling, John Hume, and Henry Kissinger.

Schelling, an economist, won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for work that he carried out at the Center. His seminal book, The Strategy of Conflict (1960), published under the Center’s auspices, transformed understandings of conflict management and deterrence. Schelling’s books acknowledge how faculty and Fellows, helped to shape his thinking. The Fellows were practitioners — ambassadors, military officers, politicians drawn from countries around the world — who spent up to an academic year at the Center.

John Hume, a Northern Irish politician, became an Associate of the Center’s Fellows Program in 1976. Hume worked then, as throughout his career, on looking conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1998. Hume collaborated with faculty and other Fellows during his time at the Center.

Henry Kissinger, the Center’s founding Associate Director and future U.S. Secretary of State, is a political scientist and historian. During his scholarly years, he published, under the Center’s auspices, a seminal book, The Necessity for Choice (1961), which argued in part against his own previous book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, regarding decisions on war and peace in the ear of nuclear weapons. He received the Nobel Prize in 1973.

Years later, with Jorge I. Domínguez as its director, the Center was renamed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs to continue its important work.