Mr. Selig Harrison Director of Asia Program, Center for International Policy Selig S. Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, is a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and director of the Century Foundation’s program on the United States and the Future of Korea. He has specialized in South Asia and East Asia for fifty years as a journalist and scholar and is the author of six books on Asian affairs and U.S. relations with Asia, including Korean Endgame: A strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement, published by Princeton University Press in May 2002. Harrison served as South Asia Correspondent of the Associated Press from 1951 to 1954, in New Delhi. He later returned as South Asia Bureau Chief of the Washington Post from 1962 to 1965, and served as Northeast Asia Bureau Chief of the Post, based in Tokyo, from 1968 to 1972. From 1974 to 1996, as a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he pursued investigative assignments every year in a variety of countries, especially those where he worked as a journalist, such as India, Pakistan, China, Japan and the two Koreas. In the last week of May, 1972, Harrison, representing the Washington Post, and along with Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times became the first Americans to visit North Korea since the Korean War and to interview Kim Il Sung. Following the second of his five visits to Pyongyang in 1987, Harrison presided over a 1989 Carnegie Endowment symposium that brought together North Korean spokesmen and American specialists and officials for the first time. In 1992, he led a Carnegie Endowment delegation to Pyongyang that learned for the first time that North Korea had reprocessed plutonium. Harrison is frequently invited to testify as an expert witness before congressional committees and he often lectures at the National Defense University, the National War College, and the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. At the same time, his outspoken, constructive criticisms of administration policies often appear on op-ed pages. He has appeared on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” “Nightline”, and other TV programs. A former managing editor of “The New Republic”, he has served as a senior fellow in charge of Asian Studies at the Brookings Institution, senior fellow at the East-West Center and professorial lecturer in Asian Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is currently an adjunct professor of Asian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs, at the George Washington University. |