David P. Forsythe

Charles J. Mach Distinguished Professor

David P. Forsythe is University Professor and Charles J. Mach Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Educated at Wake Forest (BA) and Princeton (MA, PHD) Universities, he joined the faculty at UNL in 1973 where he served as Department Chair between 1993 and 1998. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Yale, and visiting professorships at universities in Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. He has been a consultant to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. He served as President of the Human Rights Committee of the International Political Science Association, Vice President of the International Studies Association, and a member of the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His approximately 100 publications on different aspects of International Relations include: Human Rights and Comparative Foreign Policy, (United Nations University Press, 2000; edited); The United States and Human Rights, (University of Nebraska Press, 2000; edited); Human Rights and Diversity: Area Studies Revisited, (University of Nebraska Press, 2004; edited with Patrice McMahon); The Humanitarians: The International Committee of the Red Cross, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Human Rights in International Relations, (Cambridge University Press, 2000, translated into Chinese, Turkish, Korean, and Bulgarian; 2nd edition 2006); The United Nations and Changing World Politics, (Westview Press, 5th ed. 2006; with 3 other authors), and American Foreign Policy in a Globalized World, (Routledge, 2006; edited with two others). He is the General Editor of the Human Rights Encyclopedia (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 4 volumes). In the fall of 2003 the Mid-West Section of the International Studies Association presented him with the Quincy Wright Distinguished Scholar Award in honor of his lifetime profession al achievements. He is widely regarded as having been among the first to help establish the study of human rights and humanitarian affairs in the disciplines of political science and international relations. For this and other roles the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Associated named him a Distinguished Scholar in 2007.