Robert Swan was a University of Kansas Exchange Scholar to England in 1964-65 and a Rotary International Fellow to Argentina in 1966. In his graduate studies at KU, he held a Ford Foundation Fellowship and completed a masters in Political Science in 1969 and a Master of Philosophy in American Studies in 1972. He continued residing in Lawrence, Kansas after graduating from his studies.

Throughout the 1980s, Swan organized several United States-Soviet Union initatives to help improve relations between the two nations. At the January 1990 Soviet-American Citizens Summit in Moscow, Swan received two major citizen diplomacy awards recognizing his impact on U.S.-Soviet relations, and he co-chaired the roundtable on International Citizen Diplomacy.

In 1982 Swan founded Athletes United for Peace, organizing with others the Soviet track and field team's participation in the 1983 Relays at the University of Kansas.

Swan is also co-founder of the Elbe Alliance, an organization that strives to ensure that the spirit of the Soviet-American World War II cooperation, symbolized by the 1945 Elbe link-up of the Soviet and American allied troops in Torgau, Germany, remains a positive force in relations between the two countries. In 1985 he organized with Dr. Mark Scott the Meeting at the Elbe, a reunion of those Soviet and American veterans.

Swan helped organize three Soviet delegation visits to the United States in 1989, providing members of the Soviet War Veterans Committee a tour of the United States' memorials and arranging midwestern tours for two Soviet business delegations.

Swan hosted Mikhail Grobavhev at a luncheon and farewell reception in Fulton, Missouri at Westerminster College in 1992, the site of Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech and where Gorbachev gave his speech marking the end of the Cold War. In 1993 Swan met Russian President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow as part of a seven-member Elbe Veterans delegation.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Swan continued to initiate and support efforts at United States-Russian cooperation, including the creation of the U.S.-Russia Foundation.