Jorge Heine

Ambassador Jorge Heine is a lawyer, IR scholar and diplomat with a special interest in the international politics of the Global South. Before joining Boston University, he was 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 Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for China and Globalization (CCG) in Beijing. 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, Pensamiento Propio and the South African Journal of International Affairs. He has published seventeen books. His most recent book, Latin American Foreign Policies in the New World Order : The Active Non-Alignment Option ( with C. Fortin and C. Ominami, Anthem Press, 2023) has been widely reviewed and commented upon, and was cited in a cover story of The Economist and released by Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar in New Delhi. Other books include Xi-Na en el siglo del dragón: Lo que todos deben saber sobre China ( LOM, 2022);  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 the International Herald Tribune and The Miami Herald. 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. In 2023 he was awarded the Adil Najam Prize