Advisory Committee
Director of the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program. She has produced scores of publications on Colombia, Central America, Argentina, Venezuela, security and organized crime, energy, human rights, and U.S. policy in Latin America. A former foreign policy aide in Congress, Arnson has also held positions at Human Rights Watch and in academia.
Arnson is editor of Comparative Peace Processes in Latin America (Stanford, 1998); In the Wake of War: Democratization and Internal Armed Conflict in Latin America (Stanford, 2012); co-editor of Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century (Johns Hopkins 2013); and author of Crossroads: Congress, the President, and Central America, 1976-1993 (Penn State, 2d edition, 1993), among other publications. She is a member of the editorial advisory board of Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, the Spanish-language edition of the distinguished journal Foreign Affairs. She is also a member of the advisory boards of the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUSADES) and Human Rights Watch/Americas. She served as associate director of the Americas division from 1990-1994, covering Colombia and Central America. In the early 1980s, as a consultant to Americas Watch, Arnson wrote many of the organization’s first reports on human rights conditions in El Salvador.
Arnson served as an assistant professor of international relations at American University's School of International Service from 1989 to 1991. As a foreign policy aide in the House of Representatives during the Carter and Reagan administrations, she participated in the national debates over U.S. policy and human rights in Central and South America.