Gunnar Jarring

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Gunnar Jarring (12 October 1907, Brunnby, Skåne – 29 May 2002) was a Swedish Turkologist and diplomat.

Jarring studied at Lund University, and earned his PhD in 1933 with his dissertation Studien zu einer osttürkischen Lautlehre. After teaching Turkic languages at the University for the rest of the 1930s, he worked for the Swedish foreign service as attaché at their embassy in Ankara in 1940. He later held diplomatic positions in Teheran, Baghdad, and Addis Ababa, and was appointed Swedish minister to India in 1948. After several other diplomatic missions, he was Sweden's Permanent Representative the United Nations 1956-1958, and sat in the UN Security Council for the last two of those years. He was ambassador to the USA 1958-1964, and to the Soviet Union 1964-1967.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 242, Jarring was appointed by the UN Secretary-General as a special envoy for the Middle East peace process, the so-called Jarring Mission. Jarring's methods of negotiation were used unsuccessfully until the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

Gunnar Jarring continued to publish studies on Eastern Turkic languages throughout his diplomatic career and after retirement.

[edit] Trivia

Jarring is one of the few people to ever be mentioned by name in a Security Council Resolution. He was mentioned in United Nations Security Council Resolution 331.