A talk by Louis Sell, a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer and an expert on the former Yugoslavia, on the 1999 Kosovo conflict and diplomatic developments following the war.
Tuesday, Feb. 5
365 Stevens Hall
1:00-2:00 pm
Sponsored by the School of Policy and International Affairs
A retired Foreign Service Officer, Louis Sell worked for six years at the US Embassy in Moscow and eight years in various places in Yugoslavia. He served as US representative to the Joint Consultative Group in Vienna, as Director of the Office of Russian and Eurasian Analysis, Director of the Office of US-Soviet Bilateral Relations, and as Special Assistant and Executive Secretary of the US delegation to the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. From 1995 – 1996 he was political adviser to former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, the first High Representative for Bosnian Peace Implementation. In that capacity he attended the Dayton Peace Conference and participated in the first year of implementation of the Dayton accords. In 2000 he served as Kosovo Director of the International Crisis Group. He speaks Serbo-Croatian, Russian, and French. Serving as Executive Director of the American University in Kosovo Foundation (AUKF) from 2003 to 2007, Louis Sell helped found the American University in Kosovo, which opened its doors in October 2003. He has a B. A. from Franklin and Marshall College (1969) and an M. A. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Mr. Sell’s second book, From Washington to Moscow: US-Soviet Relations and the Collapse of the USSR, was published by Duke University Press in August, 2016. His political biography of Slobodan Milosevic, Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, was published in 2002. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Maine at Farmington where in 2017 he was honored to be commencement speaker. He lives in a 200-year-old farm house in Whitefield, Maine, where he also serves as a member of the volunteer fire department.