2005 Hubert H. Humphrey Award

Presented each year in recognition of notable public service by a political scientist.

Award committee: Michael Lipsky, Georgetown University, chair; Pauline Luong, Yale University; and Susan Shirk, University of California, San Diego.

Recipient: Richard H. Solomon, President, United States Institute of Peace

Citation: The Hubert Humphrey Award recognizes notable public service by a political scientist.  Most of the previous awardees served in government as appointed officials or legislators.  But public service comes in many forms, including the leadership of non-governmental organizations.   Non-governmental organizations enrich civic life and provide the underpinning for a vibrant democracy.  They contribute information, fresh ideas, and independent analysis to the policy process.   Some of them reach out beyond our borders to build bridges to the international community and promote world peace.

The 2005 award is presented to Richard H. Solomon, who has led America's unique international non-governmental organization, the United States Institute of Peace, since 1993.   The USIP is an independent, nonpartisan organization funded by the U.S. Congress. Ambassador Solomon has turned the Institute into a vibrant center of international conflict management analysis and action.  He successfully demonstrated that analysis and action could improve one another if they were combined creatively within one organization.  

USIP organizes working groups of scholars and practitioners to produce analysis and policy recommendations based on both academic research and real-life lessons.  The groups take on critical issues like North Korea's nuclear weapons, defeating the Iraq insurgency, human rights in Bangladesh. The 2005 USIP Task Force on United Nations Reform chaired by Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell is defining the debate on this critically important topic.  The Institute is breaking new ground in its work on religion as a tool for peacekeeping in Africa and the Middle East, and in its initiative to reach out to the Muslim world.   The cross-cultural negotiation project, inspired by Richard Solomon's own research on political culture, teaches us how cultural differences complicate negotiations like those between Israelis and Palestinians, Chinese and Americans.  Under Solomon's leadership, USIP has become known for intellectually creative, practical, objective analysis - a rare commodity in the increasingly partisan environment of Washington D.C.   

Unlike other think-tanks, USIP actually gets its hands dirty in conflict and post-conflict situations.  Richard Solomon has taken USIP out into the world to put its analyses into action.  The Institute trains future government ministers, legislators, and other leaders in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries.  It helps mediate the conflict between the Philippine government and the insurgent groups in Mindanao, and stabilize post-conflict Iraq.  What USIP learns by working in the trenches of real world situations, it then feeds back into its analyses and policy recommendations.

Richard Solomon was a chemistry student at M.I.T. when he discovered his fascination with political science and China.  As a PhD student of Lucian Pye, Solomon learned Chinese and did psychological interviewing of Chinese refugees to understand the distinctive patterns of Chinese political culture.  His landmark book, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture, identified the Chinese fear of "chaos" (luan) as a core concept.  Solomon, a crack photographer who appreciated the power of visual images, also published an original book of photographs and text, A Revolution in Not a Dinner Party. 

After five years as a professor at the University of Michigan, Richard Solomon was recruited by Henry Kissinger in 1971 to join the National Security Council staff and provide the expertise to help normalize U.S. relations with China.   From 1976-86, he headed up the political science and social science departments of the RAND Corporation and continued to write and publish on China and Asia.   In 1986, he returned to government and had a distinguished career as a senior official in the Department of State.  He served as director of Policy Planning (1986-89), Assistant Secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs (1989-92), and Ambassador to the Philippines (1992-93).  His proudest moment as Assistant Secretary was the negotiation for the first United Nations peacekeeping agreement for Cambodia.   As a highly effective peacemaker himself, Solomon was a logical choice to become head of USIP in 1993.

This year's Hubert H. Humphrey award recognizes the achievements of Richard H. Solomon, an outstanding leader of a premier non-governmental organization who has made important contributions to international peace and democracy.

Note:  In January, 2006, it came to the attention of the APSA that the above citation read imprecisely in one respect.  While Richard Solomon is indeed a crack photographer, the photographs in "A Revolution is Not a Dinner Party" were by other photographers, that he cited in the publication, and not by himself.  Solomon, with the collaboration of Talbott W. Huey, combined those photographs with his own text.