This year’s Kruzel Lecture features the Rt Hon Rory Stewart OBE. Stewart is the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy at Yale University - a former UK cabinet minister and diplomat and Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was a professor at Harvard University and has written a number of bestselling books. His book “The Marches” and his BBC documentary “Borderland” focuses on the history of Cumbria. He currently teaches Grand Strategy at Yale University and co-presents the UK’s top podcast, “The Rest Is Politics,” with Alastair Campbell.
Rory is also a Senior Advisor to GiveDirectly - the fastest growing non-profit in the world last year, specializing in cash transfers to the extreme poor, particularly in Africa.
Previously, Rory was the UK Secretary of State for International Development, Minister of State for Justice, Minister of State in Foreign Office and DFID (covering Africa, Middle East, and Asia), Minister for the Environment and Chair of the House of Commons Defense Select Committee.
After a brief period as an infantry officer he joined the UK Diplomatic Service, serving overseas in Jakarta, as British representative to Montenegro in the wake of the Kosovo crisis, and as the coalition Deputy-Governor of two provinces of Southern Iraq following the intervention of 2003. He left the diplomatic service to undertake a two-year walk across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal.
In 2005, he established the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul, working to restore a section of the old city, establish a clinic, primary school, and Arts Institute, and bring Afghan
crafts to international markets. In 2008, he became the Ryan Professor of Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director for the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy.
Rory has written five books: “The Places in Between,” “Occupational Hazards or The Prince of the Marshes,” “Can Intervention Work?,” “The Marches,” and “Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within,” which was published in the United States under the title “How Not to Be a Politician: A Memoir.”
The Joseph J. Kruzel Lecture
Each year the Mershon Center for International Security Studies hosts a lecture to honor the memory of Joseph J. Kruzel Jr. (1945-1995.) Kruzel taught political science at the Ohio State University between episodes of public service that included briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War, serving in the State Department delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks in Helsinki, and joining the Clinton Administration in 1993 to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO policy.
In this role, Kruzel created Partnership for Peace, a program instituted in 1994 to build trust and cooperation between NATO and non-member states in Eastern Europe. He was sent to Bosnia as the Defense Department special envoy and chief negotiator on the US team working to end the Yugoslav Wars. In 1995, in the course of that mission, he was killed with two other US diplomats when their armored personnel carrier crashed into a ravine. President Clinton awarded him, posthumously, the Presidential Citizens Medal.
