Jorge Heine

Ambassador Jorge Heine is a lawyer, IR scholar and diplomat with a special interest in the international politics of the Global South. He was most recently a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. (2018-2019). He has served as ambassador of Chile to China (2014-2017), to India (2003-2007) and to South Africa (1994-1999), and as a Cabinet Minister in the Chilean Government. A past Vice-President of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), he was CIGI Professor of Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, from 2007 to 2017, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow; a Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford University; a United Nations Research Fellow at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC); a Visiting Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz; and the Pablo Neruda Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Paris.

He is currently a non-resident Wilson Center Global Fellow at The Wilson Center in Washington D.C., a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for China and Globalization (CCG) in Beijing, and an Honorary Visiting Professor of International Relations at the University of Sichuan in Chengdu. He has been a consultant to the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Trinidad & Tobago Ministry of External Affairs, Oxford Analytica and Frost & Sullivan. A past president of the Caribbean Studies Association and of the Chilean Political Science Association, he served on the board of the Institute of International Relations (IIR) of the University of the West Indies, and was the first chair of the jury for the Luciano Tomassini International Relations Award of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in 2011-2012.

He is on the editorial board of Diplomacy & Foreign Policy, World Affairs, Estudios Internacionales, Pensamiento Propio and the South African Journal of International Affairs. He has published fifteen books, including 21st Century Democracy Promotion in the Americas (with B. Weiffen, Routledge, 2015); the Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (with A. Cooper and R.Thakur, Oxford University Press, 2013,2015); and The Dark Side of Globalization (with R.Thakur, UN University Press, 2011), and some 100 journal articles and book chapters. An active commentator on current affairs, he is frequently interviewed by international media and has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune. He holds a law degree from the University of Chile, a B.Phil. in Modern Political Analysis from York University in England and an M.A. and a PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in California.

Ambassador Heine’s areas of expertise include diplomatic studies, international relations, international politics of the global south, foreign policies of rising powers, globalization, multilateralism, democracy promotion, democratic transitions, transitional justice, as well as China, India, and Latin America.