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Caleb Rossiter - Biographical Sketch
contact: rossiter@american.edu
Dr. Caleb Rossiter is a Washington-based author and advocate in the area of national security policy. For 40 years he has worked in opposition to U.S. domination of developing countries through military, financial, and covert support for repressive governments. He is currently the director of the anti-imperialist American Exceptionalism Media Project.
Over the past 20 years Dr. Rossiter has been a statistics professor in American University's School of International Service and Department of Mathematics and Statistics, the executive director of the CO2 Coalition of "unalarmed" climate scientists and energy economistsa,a Fulbright senior specialist for academic exchanges with African countries, a foreign policy specialist for Representative Bill Delahunt, and a consultant on methods to reduce civilian casualties of war for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which founded the Nobel Prize-winning international campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines.
From 1984 to 1990 Dr. Rossiter served as deputy director for foreign policy of the bipartisan Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus of the U.S. Congress; from 1992 to 1999 he was founder and director of Demilitarization for Democracy, a research and advocacy center that promoted civilian control of the armed forces in developing countries. DFD also focused on increasing African-American and African participation in the professional arms control community. In both positions, Dr. Rossiter wrote research reports on U.S. military and financial support for repressive regimes and promoted legislation restricting such support, with particular emphasis on El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. He was one of the founder of both the "No Arms to Dictators" Code of Conduct movement and the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines.
Dr. Rossiter earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in Policy Analysis in 1983, with a dissertation on the diplomatic and developmental uses of U.S. foreign aid in Southern Africa during Zimbabwe's war of independence. He is the author of five books: Development versus Diplomacy: The Bureaucratic Struggle for Control of U.S. Foreign Aid in Southern Africa, 1973-1981 (1985); The Chimes of Freedom Flashing: A Personal History of the Vietnam Anti-war Movement and the 1960s (1996); The Turkey and the Eagle: The Struggle for America's Global Role (2010); Ain't Nobody Be Learnin' Nothin': The Fraud and the Fix for High-Poverty Schools (2015); and two foreign policy novels, The Weatherman on Trial: A Bombshell Story about Bringing the War Home (2019) and Arms Deals: A Mar'Shae McGurk Thriller about "Shopping" to Get Yours.
Dr. Rossiter has written dozens on reports on foreign and military policy, including: Barriers to Reform: A Profile of El Salvador's Military Leaders (1990); Fighting Retreat: Military Political Power and Other Barriers to Africa's Democratic Transition (1997); Commander in Chief: Contrasting Presidential Roles in the World Campaigns to Ban Chemical Weapons and Landmines (1999); and Winning in Korea without Landmines (2000). In 1998 he was the Democratic candidate for Congress in New York's 31st congressional district.
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