‘Waging Peace’: A Look Back on Carter’s Post Presidency

Nelson Mandela (R) is reunited with Jimmy Carter as other members of the Elders watch in Johannesburg, South Africa, on May 29, 2010. Jeff Moore via Getty Images

When the late former President Jimmy Carter left the White House in 1981, his life as a diplomat and negotiator the world over was just beginning.

Beginning with the founding of his nonprofit organization the Carter Center in 1982, the 39th president spent the next 40 years “waging peace” upon the world, building homes, ensuring fair elections, promoting health, and resolving conflicts—sometimes by negotiating personally with dangerous leaders.

Here is a look back on Carter’s post-presidency:

The Carter Center and Carter Work Project

Carter and his late wife, Rosalynn Carter, founded the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1982, with a three-pronged global mission to protect human rights, resolve conflicts, and prevent disease.

Since its founding, the Carter Center has conducted peace and health-focused initiatives in more than 80 countries across five continents, including an ongoing focus on Central and South America and mainland China.

Most recently, the Carter Center hosted the Forum in Honor of Jimmy Carter and the 45th Anniversary of the Normalization of U.S.-China Relations on Jan. 9–10, 2024, in Atlanta.

Speakers at the event included U.S. Ambassador to China R. Nicholas Burns, who appeared virtually, and Minister Jing Quan of the Chinese Embassy to the United States.

The center also works with nations to oversee elections. Their work began with a mission to Panama in 1989 led by Carter in which the election of Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega was declared fraudulent. Since then, the center has conducted 125 full and limited election observation missions in 40 countries and three Native American nations.

This includes monitoring an audit of Georgia and Arizona election results in 2020.

The center describes its mission as “waging peace,” partnering with scores of private and national organizations around the world. This includes Habitat for Humanity with which the center partnered in 1984 on what would become the annual Carter Work Project. The former president’s final participation in the project was in October 2019 in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of 95.

In its 2023 report, the center said that $380 million in cash, pledges, and in-kind gifts were received from more than 98,601 donors in 2022–2023.

Peace Negotiations

Carter’s work with the Carter Center also involved him in leading delegations and conducting negotiations around the world.

After Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in a military coup in 1994, Carter led a delegation to arrange the terms that returned Aristide to power and avoid a U.S. invasion.

In December 1994, he and the former first lady traveled with Carter Center staff to Bosnia, where they brokered a four-month cease-fire.

Carter would then travel to Africa in 1995 to assist in more peace talks, including mediating a cease-fire in Sudan that March.

In July 2007, he became a member of The Elders, an international group of leaders started by former South African President Nelson Mandela focused on global issues. Carter held a “front-line” role until May 2016.

He also visited Cuba in May 2002, giving a television address to the communist island nation, and he met with the terrorist group Hamas in April 2008.

His most memorable missions might have been the ones he made to North Korea.

North Korea

In June 1994, Carter became the first U.S. president, sitting or former, to visit North Korea.

According to the Carter Center, he and his wife were invited by North Korean President Kim Il Sung to negotiate the defusion of tensions between North Korea and the U.S. and South Korea over the communist nation’s nuclear program.

After two days of talks, Kim agreed to freeze his nuclear program in exchange for resuming dialogue with the U.S., which led to subsequent talks and agreements reached in October 1994 and June 1995. That framework remained in place until 2002.

The Carter Center returned to North Korea with several NGOs in April 1999 to improve food security by boosting potato production. They purchased 1,000 metric tons of potato seeds and oversaw planting in May of that year.

Carter himself would make his second trip to North Korea in August 2010 to negotiate the release of Aijalon Gomes, an American teacher who had served seven months of an eight-year sentence of hard labor for illegally entering the country.

After two days of discussion at the invitation of North Korean officials and the approval of the White House, Carter secured Gomes’s release and amnesty from the chairman of the National Defense Commission, Kim Jong Il.

Nobel Peace Prize and Other Awards

The former president received the Nobel Peace Prize on Dec. 10, 2002, for his “untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

He received the U.N. Human Rights Prize in December 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In August 1999, he and Rosalynn Carter were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Bill Clinton.

Carter was also named a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in biography for his book, “An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood,” in April 2002. He became a Grammy nominee in December 2014 when another book of his, “A Call To Action,” was a runner-up for the best spoken-word album category. The former president published 32 books.

Carter was publicly embraced by Democratic presidential hopefuls as a party elder for the first time from the Fall of 2019 through early 2020, and he and his wife celebrated their 77th wedding anniversary on July 7, 2023.

Rosalynn Carter died at age 96 on Nov. 19, 2023. Jimmy Carter died at age 100 on Dec. 29, 2024.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.