Tom Palmer

Tom Palmer
Vice President for International Programs & General Director, Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity

Dr. Tom G. Palmer is Atlas’s Vice President for International Programs and General Director of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity. Previously he was Vice President for International Programs at the Cato Institute and Director of the Center for Promotion of Human Rights.  He is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Director of Cato University, the Institute’s educational arm. Dr. Palmer has long been active in the freedom movement and was very active in the late 1980s and the early 1990s in the spread of classical liberal ideas in the Soviet bloc states and their successors.  He continues to be active throughout the region through his work with www.InLiberty.ru, the Global Initiative’s Russian-language program. He also established and supervises the  Global Initiative’s programs in Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Portuguese, Chinese, French, Behasa Melayu/Indonesia, Africa (in a several languages), Urdu, Vietnamese, and Hindi.  He was an H. B. Earhart Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford University, and a vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. He frequently lectures around the world — from England to Iraq to China to Kyrgyzstan to Ghana to Afghanistan to Brazil and many other countries — on political science, the economics of institutions, public choice, the history of liberty, and the moral, legal, and historical foundations of individual rights. He is the author of Realizing Freedom: The Theory, History, and Practice of Liberty, has contributed essays to books published by Princeton University Press, Routledge, Cambridge University Press, and other publishers, and has published articles and reviews on politics and morality in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Ethics, Critical Review, and Constitutional Political Economy, as well as in publications such as Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Die Welt, and The Spectator of London. He received his B.A. in liberal arts from St. Johns College in Annapolis, Maryland, his M.A. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and his doctorate in politics from Oxford University.