Celso Amorim has served as Brazil’s minister of foreign relations under President Itamar Franco from 1993 to 1994. He served in the same position under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from 2003 to 2010. Finally, he was minister of defense under President Dilma Rousseff from 2011 to 2014. He also recently acted as chair of UNITAID, a global health initiative, and is a commissioner for the Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance. He has also written a memoir, Acting Globally: Memoirs of Brazil’s Assertive Foreign Policy. 

Amorim’s long history of government service began in 1989 and included the positions at the Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of External Relations, and Brazil’s foreign-affairs agency. Notably, he represented Brazil at the United Nations.

Amorim graduated in 1965 from the Rio Branco Institute, a graduate school of international relations. He went on to earn a post-graduate degree in international relations from the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna in 1967.

Amorim was an event speaker at the Dialogue.