About the Author

Roy Gutman, a former senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (2002-2003), is an award-winning journalist who has reported on international affairs for more than three decades. He is currently foreign editor at the McClatchy Washington bureau.
 

From 1989 to 1994, he served as the Newsday European bureau chief, reporting on the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany, and the violent disintegration of Tito’s Yugoslavia. His reports on “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including the first documented accounts of Serb-run concentration camps, won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (1993), the George Polk Award for foreign reporting, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, the Hal Boyle award of the Overseas Press Club, the Heywood Broun Award of the Newspaper Guild, a special Human Rights in Media award of the International League for Human Rights, and other honors. In 2002, he was a co-winner of the Edgar Allen Poe award of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and in 2003, the National Headliners First Prize for Magazines and the Society of Publishers in Asia awards for excellence in magazines and reporting.
 

Gutman reported for Reuters in Bonn, Vienna, Belgrade, London and Washington, including stints as the Belgrade bureau chief and State Department correspondent. His nineteen years as a Newsday reporter included eight years as national security reporter in Washington, and he served 2-1/2 years as foreign editor. In between stints at Newsday, he was also Newsweek diplomatic correspondent for two years, based in Washington, D.C., and a Ferris professor in the Humanities Department at Princeton.
 

He is the author of Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American policy in Nicaragua 1981-1987 (Simon & Schuster 1988), named one of the 200 best books of 1988 by the New York Times and the best American book of the year by the London Times Literary Supplement; andA Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize Winning Dispatches on the ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ of Bosnia (Macmillan 1993). The latter was published in eight countries, including in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the last year of the conflict.
 

Gutman and essayist David Rieff co-edited Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know(W.W. Norton 1999), which reduces the main precepts of international humanitarian law to a set of tools reporters can use in reporting conflict. The book gave rise to a small non-profit education project at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, which is updating the text, overseeing foreign language editions, and developing other projects including a journalism school curriculum and web site.