Director of the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue
Previously, he was the Director of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the leading international body monitoring internal displacement worldwide. Zamudio has been working on human rights and humanitarian issues at a management level both nationally in Norway and internationally, including as director of the Norwegian Refugee Council´s Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) in Geneva, as manager of the Human Rights House in Oslo and chief of staff for “Kontaktutvalget mellom innvandrere og norske myndigheter,” and as country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Timor Leste, Darfur and Sudan. In Columbia, he served as international expert for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. http://peace.no/new-director- at-the- nansen-center- for-peace- and-dialogue/.
Ambassador Withers combines intellectual and diplomatic achievement in a career distinguished by academic research and public service. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University in Modern Chinese history, an M.A. in East Asian Studies from McGill University, a B.A. from Harvard University in history, and has also completed graduate- level research at Nanjing University, located in Nanjing, China. He has studied Chinese, Russian, Dutch, French and Latvian. He entered the Foreign Service as Political Officer at the Hague, and has served in Nigeria, Moscow, Latvia, and Albania, as well as in many postings with the Department of State in Washington, D.C., including as Director of the Operations Center, Special Assistant to the Office of the Deputy Secretary, and in the Office of Northern European Affairs. His commitment to Albania since serving as Ambassador 2007 – 2010 has been extraordinary, earning him honorary citizenship in
Vlore and the Key to the City of Tirana. He has been an active proponent of safeguarding Albania’s Cultural Heritage and has promoted the positive values at the heart of Albanian identity, such as the Besa. He is currently writing a book about his father’s life of service to humanity and country, a path that Ambassador Withers has followed in his own life.
