Walter Dorn

Royal Military College of Canada and the Canadian Forces College
215 Yonge Blvd.
Toronto, ON
M5M 3H9 Canada 

Research Interests

Arms control, conflict prevention, human security, peace operations, religions & armed force, United Nations

Professional information

Walter Dorn is Professor of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College and at RMC. He is a scientist by training (Ph.D. Chemistry, Univ. of Toronto), whose doctoral research was aimed at chemical sensing for arms control. He assisted with the negotiation, ratification and implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. He addressed parliamentary committees in nations on several continents to support the ratification and implementation of the treaty. His interests are now broader, covering both international and human security, especially peace operations and the United Nations.

He is an “operational professor” with extensive experience in field missions. In 1999, he served as a district electoral officer with the United Nations Mission in East Timor. He also served in Ethiopia (on a UNDP project) and at UN headquarters as a Training Adviser with UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations. In 2014, he was on the UN’s Panel of Experts on Technology and Innovation in UN Peacekeeping. In 2017-18, he served the “Innovation and Protection Technology Expert” within the UN’s Department of Field Support, providing advice to improve UN missions in the Middle East and Africa, with visits to Lebanon, Central African Republic, D.R. Congo, and Mali.

Since 1983, he has served as the UN Representative of Science for Peace, a Canadian NGO, and addressed the UN General Assembly in 1988 at the Second UN Special Session on Disarmament. In the United States, he was a Senior Research Fellow at Cornell University (Einaudi Centre for International Studies, 1998-2000), a consultant to Yale University (United Nations Studies, 1996), a visiting scholar at the Cooperative Monitoring Centre (Sandia National Laboratories, NM, 1999) and adviser to the Federation of American Scientist (Biological Weapons Control expert group, 1990). 

At the University of Toronto, he was a Research Fellow with the International Relations Programme as well as the Peace and Conflict Studies Programme, and the Physical Science Don at Trinity College.

In 2001/02 he was the inaugural DFAIT Human Security Fellow (academic). He is now working on a book tentatively titled "The Emerging Global Watch: UN Monitoring for International Peace and Human Security".