Director of Carr Center Selected for British Parliament
by Joel Kenrick on October 30, 2009 in HKS News, News
Professor Rory Stewart, who was appointed Director of the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights only last year, looks certain to become a Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom after an expenses scandal claimed the scalps of leading politicians in the British Parliament.
On October 25, Stewart was selected as the Conservative candidate in the Penrith and Borders constituency in northern England. The seat has been held by the Conservative party since it was created in 1950, and is considered one of the safest Conservative seats in the country.
The current MP, David Maclean, announced in June he would be standing down for health reasons after it was revealed that he used taxpayer money to renovate his home, which he then sold tax-free.
A former Iraqi provincial governor, best-selling author and leading authority on military intervention, Stewart said before the election that he was deeply “conflicted” about the prospect of leaving the Kennedy School and a job he has “really begun to enjoy more and more” after such a short period.
“I took the job [of Director] assuming there was no chance of going into Parliament for at least six years,” Stewart said. “I wasn’t even a member of the Conservative Party at the time.”
But last year, dozens of Members of Parliament announced they would be standing down due to an expenses scandal. David Cameron, the leader of the British Conservative Party, publicly called on ‘ordinary’ members of the public to apply to become candidates for the party at the 2010 election.
Rory Stewart was one of those to answer the call and was quickly added to the ‘A’ list of candidates that local parties were asked to choose from when drawing up a short-list to replace retiring MPs.
While his family is from Scotland, Rory Stewart was born in Hong Kong and brought up in Malaysia. On his return to Britain, he was educated at Eton boarding school and was an army officer before studying at Balliol College, Oxford. While studying, he worked as a summer tutor to Prince William and Prince Harry.
After leaving Oxford, Stewart was fast-tracked through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where he was posted to Indonesia and Montenegro. Yet in 2000, at the age of only 27, he gave up his promising career and spent 20 months walking 6,000 miles across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Nepal, staying in over 500 villages along the way.
On his return, he wrote about his experiences in The Places in Between, a New York Times bestseller, before travelling by taxi to Baghdad in 2003, only months after the invasion. Within a month, he was acting Governor of Maysan, a southern Iraqi province.
After serving as a Carr Center fellow in 2005, he founded the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a charity he still runs, which aims to conserve the old city in Kabul and revive traditional artisan skills in Afghanistan.
Professor Stewart’s practical experiences have proved valuable in teaching his popular course, War, States and Interventions, a course aimed at policy makers and practitioners in post-conflict states.
“The course is valuable in that it presents the complexity of the situation on the ground,” said Colonel Debra Sinnott, a National Security Fellow. “He is honest about there being no set answers and leads us through the hard questions to ask.” In the early weeks of the course, Stewart cantered through hundreds of years of enlightenment theory and readings from war poets, classic novels, and colonial essayists.
“He will spend half an hour on the rhetorical basis of speech patterns and assign readings about forest management in ancient Prussia,” said Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Donahoe, also a National Security Fellow. “Initially, you question why, but he is a very gifted individual with an ability to bring these readings back and use it as a very effective prism.”
Stewart has played down his current influence, though he is known to have advised leading American officials on future policy in Afghanistan. ‘The most I can do is to lay out some of the issues if a politician is looking for a way of explaining them. That’s why I enjoy spending time with [Senator] Kerry and [former] Senator George] McGovern. I try to produce stories they can relate to in their own speeches.”
Stewart admitted he can sometimes “be restless and impatient” but has argued that his experiences as a soldier, civil servant, charity worker, teacher and writer are ideal training for a politician.
“I realized as a civil servant the limits to policy influence. At least in Britain, if the main interest is in influencing policy, then you need to be in Parliament.”
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