Bruce Allyn is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project and Adjunct Faculty member at the University of Oregon Law School. For three decades, he has served as a strategic advisor and negotiation trainer to national and state governments and Fortune 500 companies.
He has held positions as Director, Harvard-Soviet Joint Study; Associate Director, Harvard Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project; Program Director, Conflict Management Group; Consultant to NBC and ABC News; Partner, Monitor Group and Officer of Harvard University.
His current research focuses on negotiation and strategies for nonviolent action and facilitating dialogue on environmental sustainability across for-profit, nonprofit and government boundaries.
He is writing a book on the nonviolent collapse of the Soviet Union, using it as a case study to derive lessons for regime change in current conflicts, particularly in the Middle East.
Allyn received his PhD. in Political Economy from Harvard University, an M.A. in Soviet Studies from Harvard and an M.A. in Politics and Philosophy from Oxford University. He graduated Summa cum laude in Government and Russian from Dartmouth College.
In the 1980s, Allyn was a member of a high-level delegation of scholars and former officials who worked with President Mikhail Gorbachev’s government on negotiations to reduce nuclear risk and reform foreign and domestic policy. He co-authored the acclaimed Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Soviet Collapse (Pantheon: 1993), which tells the story of the historic meetings that he worked to convene bringing Robert McNamara, Anatoly Gromyko, Sergei Khrushchev, Fidel Castro and others together for the first time to tell their stories of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. For the fiftieth anniversary of the crisis, Allyn published a memoir of the remarkable dialogues: The Edge of Armageddon: Lessons from the Brink (Rosetta Books, September 2012).
In 1995, Allyn led the creation of “The Hague Initiative” to develop approaches to political and economic conflict resolution in breakaway regions of the former Soviet Union. Working directly with the head of the Russian Security Council and the President of Chechnya, Allyn convened the two sides in the Peace Palace in The Hague for a series of meetings that were publicly acknowledged as providing a basis for the ceasefire announced by President Yeltsin in April 1996.
