Rory Stewart: The Places in Between

Hosted by College of Arts and Sciences Core Curriculum Core Current Affairs Association

Rory Stewart, director of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and founder and chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving Afghan communities, discusses the foundation and his New York Times best-selling memoir, The Places in Between, which chronicles his walk across Afghanistan following the collapse of Taliban rule in 2002.

Stewart begins by showing the photographs normally associated with Afghanistan, which, he says, “show a stark, brutalized landscape. These are photographs that make you think in terms of violence and of victims.” He recently attended a New York Public Library exhibition of photos on Afghanistan. He was sure, he says, that the exhibition would consist of images of gun-wielding women in burkas, burn victims, and destroyed humvees. He was right.

Basically, says Stewart, Afghanistan is seen as a country lacking an infrastructure and filled with drugs, violence, poverty, and international consultants. It is true that 70 percent of the population cannot read or write, there are insufficient roads, and the country produces 93 percent of the world’s heroin, but still receives $5 billion in international aid.

But there’s another, often not shown, side to the country. Afghans seek jobs and skills and have a renewed pride in their national culture. The international community needs a highly visible, permanent symbol in the center of Kabul, Stewart says, which is where the Turquoise Mountain Foundation comes in.

The foundation is dedicated to serving Afghan communities by investing in the regeneration of the historic commercial center of Kabul, providing basic services, saving historic buildings, and constructing a new bazaar and galleries for traditional craft businesses. One of the foundation’s projects was building a school that now educates more than 165 children. The program has been successful, Stewart says, because the community wants it.

A question-and-answer period follows.

January 29, 2009, 5 p.m.
The Castle

Video length is 01:04:58.

About the speaker:
Rory Stewart is the director of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and founder and chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving Afghan communities. He studied history and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford University, and then joined the British Diplomatic Service. He was a private tutor to Princes William and Harry. He worked in the British Embassy in Indonesia and as the British representative in Montenegro. In 2000, he began walking from Turkey to Bangladesh. He covered 6,000 miles on foot across Pakistan, India, and Nepal and Afghanistan after the collapse of Taliban rule in 2002 — a journey that was the basis for his New York Times best-selling memoir The Places in Between.

He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and Granta, among others. In 2004, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire and became a fellow of the Carr Center.

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