Robert Flaten, former ambassador to Rwanda, will give a talk at Coastal Carolina University on “Competing Nationalisms in the Middle East.” The event, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled for Monday, March 20 at 6 p.m. in the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts Recital Hall.

The discussion, sponsored by Coastal’s Globalist Club, will focus on the status quo in the Middle East, how it has changed in the past decade and how it will likely change in the next decade.

Flaten served as the United States Ambassador to Rwanda from December 1990 to November 1993. He retired from the Foreign Service in May 1994, and recently chaired the executive committee of the Noble Peace Prize Forum. Among other posts, he is a distinguished lecturer in political science at St. Olaf College (Minn.), vice president of United Nations Association/Minnesota and a Minnesota representative of the Immortal Chaplains Foundation.

As a career Foreign Service officer, Flaten was director of the State Department Office of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka and director of the Office of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh Affairs in Washington, D.C. His other State Department assignments included: deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv from 1982 to 1986; six years in the State Department Office of Congressional Relations; and deputy assistant secretary of state from 1979 to 1981. Flaten also served in Peshawar, Pakistan, and in Strasbourg, France, as a Foreign Service inspector and as desk officer for Afghanistan. Flaten completed the course work for a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and received an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Luther College in Iowa.

For more information call (843) 349-2966.