Gunnar Jarring

Gunnar Jarring, 1933.

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

Jarring was born in Brunnby, Höganäs Municipality, Skåne County (then part of Malmöhus County), Sweden. He earned a Ph.D. from Lund University in 1933 with his dissertation Studien zu einer osttürkischen Lautlehre ("Studies in Eastern-Turkic Sound Science"). He taught Turkic languages at the university for the rest of the 1930s.

Diplomatic career

Gunnar Jarring (far left) with his wife, Agnes Charlier Jarring, Prime Minister of Sweden Tage Erlander and wife Aina Andersson Erlander and President Kennedy, 1961

Jarring entered the Swedish diplomatic service and 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, and then minister to Pakistan. After several other diplomatic missions, he was Sweden's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1956 to 1958, and sat in the Security Council for the last two of those years. He was ambassador to the United States from 1958 to 1964, and to the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1973. In that capacity he signed on behalf of his country on the Outer Space Treaty in January 1967.

After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 242, Jarring was appointed by the UN Secretary-General U Thant 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. He is one of the few people to ever be mentioned by name in a United Nations Security Council Resolution, appearing in Resolution 331.

List of Publications

Books

• Gunnar Jarring. On The Distribution Of Turk Tribes In Afghanistan: An Attempt At A Preliminary Classification. Lund: Hakan Ohlsson, 1939.
• Gunnar Jarring (1938). Uzbek texts from Afghan Turkestan: with glossary. C. W. K. Gleerup. 
• Åter till Kashgar

Selected Articles

• Gunnar Jarring. Obituary: Nikolaj Aleksandrovic Baskakov. Turkic Languages 1, 1997.
• Gunnar Jarring. The toponym Takla-makan. Turkic Languages 1, 1997.

Further reading

• The Jarring Mission - A Study of the UN Peace Effort in the Middle East, 1967-1971 Hulda Kjeang Mørk, University of Oslo, 2007.

External links

• The Jarring Collection – Manuscripts from Eastern Turkestan