Mr. Alvaro de Soto is currently a member of the Global Leadership Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute in New York.

Mr. Alvaro de Soto’s distinguished career includes 25 years with the United Nations, where he worked extensively on issues in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. He first joined the United Nations in 1982 as Special Assistant to Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. In 1990, as the Secretary-General’s representative, he conducted successful peace negotiations between the government of El Salvador and the FMLN, which culminated in the 1992 Peace Accord.

Mr. de Soto served as Senior Political Advisor to UN Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali from 1992 through 1994. In 1995, he became Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs at the United Nations, and served as UN Special Envoy for Myanmar from 1995 to 1999. He mediated the 1999-2004 negotiations on Cyprus, which led to parallel referendums on the comprehensive UN settlement plan. From 2003 to 2005, de Soto was the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for the Western Sahara. He then served as UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Envoy to the Middle East Quartet, and Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General to the PLO and the Palestinian Authority from 2005 to 2007.

Since 2011, Mr. de Soto has led a masters seminar on post-Cold War conflict resolution at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) at Sciences Po, in Paris. He has published a number of articles and book chapters, including the recent “Diplomacy and Mediation” for Wiley-Blackwell’s 2014 Handbook on Global Security Policy. Mr. de Soto also hosts “Conversations with Alvaro de Soto,” a series of public interviews with senior mediators and negotiators at Columbia University.