Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart is a political and intellectual phenomenon with an extraordinary life history. He briefly served in the British Army, studied history and philosophy at Oxford, then worked as a British diplomat in Indonesia and Montenegro. After the Iraq War – when the US and the UK held power over Iraq as part of a provisional government – he became governor of two provinces in Southern Iraq. About this turbulent time he wrote The Prince of the Marshes (2006). In 2005 Stewart moved to Kabul to found the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-governmental organization that aims to preserve the cultural heritage in Afghanistan, promotes age-old craftsmanship and does social work. Between 2008 and 2010 he combined his work for the Turquoise Mountain Foundation with his professorship at the Harvard Kennedy School and his directorship at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Convinced that he could best realize his ideals in politics, Stewart decided to stand for election in the UK general elections in 2010. He was elected for the Conservative Party in the Penrith and The Border constituency, and continued his political career in the governments of David Cameron and then Theresa May. Between 2015 and 2019 he successively served as Minister of State for Environment, for International Development and for Prisons, and finally as Secretary of State for International Development. In 2019 he attempted to follow up Theresa May as prime minister, but was defeated by Boris Johnson. After this, he left politics. Stewart wrote about his time in the House of Commons and as a minister in his bestselling book Politics on the Edge (2023). He currently teaches at Yale and hosts the successful podcast The Rest is Politics together with Alastair Campbell.

A review of Stewarts book The Places in Between (2004), about his journey on foot from Turkey to Bangladesh, across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal, is available in the Nexus Treasury.