Classes are taught at the United Nations Foundation, location one block from The White
House, by Professor of Practice, Ray Walser, Ph.D.
With over 40 years of teaching experience and an extensive career as a policy analyst
and foreign service officer, Dr. Walser hopes to provide students in the program with
real-world insight and first-hand knowledge of what careers in international affairs,
governmental or non-governmental, may look like. In his time as an academic, Dr. Walser
has taught courses on international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and politics and
conflict in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. His classroom experiences range
from teaching undergraduates at Bluefield College, cadets at the United States Military
Academy at West Point, interns/students in the University of Georgia's Washington
Semester program and graduate students in Missouri State University's Department of
Defense and Strategic Studies, also in Washington, D.C. Dr. Walser also served as
chairperson for Western Hemisphere area studies at the U.S. Department of State's
Foreign Service Institute. In short, Dr. Walser is no stranger to engaging with students
interested in shaping diplomacy and international relations in our country and around
the world.
Outside the classroom, Walser served as a Foreign Service Officer from 1980-2007 in
a wide variety of overseas locations such as Nicaragua, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica,
and South Africa as well as the Bureaus of African, European and Western Hemisphere
Affairs here in the U.S. In 2007, he began applying his collective experience to a
new role as a Senior Policy Analyst for The Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington,
D.C., where he focused on political and security issues in Latin America. Prior to
retiring in 2013, he conducted field research in Colombia and Mexico and served as
an electoral observer during the presidential elections in El Salvador and Honduras.
In addition to his government service and academic career, Walser has authored op-eds
and other publications featured in the New York Times, New York Post, The Washington
Times, Christian Science Monitor, Miami Herald, The National Interest and the Journal
of International Security Affairs. He has shared his expertise in testimony before
both houses of Congress on several occasions between 2008 and 2011, and has appeared
on CNN, PBS, Al Jazeera, BBC World Service and other media.
