Roderick 'Rory' James Nugent Stewart OBE FRSL DUniv (born 3 January 1973) is a British academic, author, and Conservative politician. Since May 2010, he has been the Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border, in the county of Cumbria, North West England.
Stewart was a deputy governor of a province of occupied Iraq in 2003-2004. He is known for his book about this experience, The Prince of the Marshes (also published under the title Occupational Hazards) and for his epic 2000-2002 walk across Afghanistan, which served as the basis for another book, The Places in Between, as well as his later cultural development work in Afghanistan as the Executive Chairman of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a British charity.
He also served briefly in the Black Watch regiment of the British Army and in the British Foreign Service, where he worked as a diplomat in Indonesia and the Balkans.
Stewart, whose family hail from Crieff in Perthshire, Scotland, was born in Hong Kong, raised in Malaysia and Scotland and educated at the Dragon School, Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied modern history and politics, philosophy and economics. While a student at Oxford, he was a summer tutor to Prince William and Prince Harry. He has an honorary Doctorate from the University of Stirling. As a teenager, he was a member of the Labour Party.
After a brief period as an officer in the British Army on a gap year commission (to the Black Watch), Stewart joined the Foreign Office. He served in the British Embassy in Indonesia from 1997 to 1999, working on issues related to East Timor independence, and as the British Representative to Montenegro in the wake of the Kosovo campaign. From 2000 to 2002 he walked across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, a journey of 6000 miles, during which time he stayed in five hundred different village houses.
After the coalition invasion of Iraq, he was appointed the Coalition Provisional Authority Deputy Governor of Maysan and Senior Advisor in Dhi Qar, two provinces in southern Iraq. His responsibilities included holding elections, resolving tribal disputes and implementing development projects. He faced an incipient civil war and growing civil unrest from his base in a CIMIC compound in Al Amarah, and in May 2004 was in command of his compound in Nasiriyah when it was besieged by Sadrist militia. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his service in Iraq at the age of 31. While Stewart initially supported the Iraq War, the Coalition's inability to achieve a more humane, prosperous state led him in retrospect to believe the invasion had been a mistake.
In late 2004, Stewart became a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University.
In 2006, at the request of HRH The Prince of Wales and HE Hamid Karzai, President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, he established, as Executive Chairman, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a human development NGO, in Afghanistan, and relocated to Kabul.
In July 2008 he was appointed Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights at Harvard University and Director of the John F. Kennedy School of Government Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He has frequently been called on to provide advice on Afghanistan and Iraq to policy-makers, particularly in the US, UK and Canada. Having acceded to the position on 1 January 2009, he combined the role with his charitable work in Afghanistan and with service on a number of boards, including the International Development Research Centre of Canada.
Stewart left his position at Harvard in March 2010 (maintaining, however, an advisory position there), and is due to step down as Executive Chairman of the Turquoise Mountain Trust in May 2010.
His first book, The Places in Between was an account of his solo walk across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002. It was a New York Times bestseller, was named one of the New York Times' 10 notable books in 2006 and was hailed by the NYT as a "flat-out masterpiece". It won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Scottish Arts Council prize, the Spirit of Scotland award and the Premio de Literatura de Viaje Caminos del Cid. It was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. The book was adapted into a radio play by Benjamin Yeoh and was broadcast in 2007 on BBC Radio 4.
Stewart's second book, Occupational Hazards (UK title) or And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq (US title), describes his experiences governing in Iraq. It too was critically acclaimed with The New York Times saying "Stewart seems to be living one of the most remarkable lives on record." His books have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Danish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Lithuanian and Bosnian. Stage versions, TV documentaries and film scripts have been optioned. Until 2008, when he took up his position at Harvard, Stewart resided in Kabul as Executive Chairman of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation.
Many of Stewart's articles (which have appeared in newspapers and magazines from the New York Times and the Guardian to the London and New York Review of Books), like his interviews on CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC and Channel 4, have cautioned against over-ambitious foreign interventions, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. His 2008 cover article in Time magazine, where he debated against Presidential candidates Obama and McCain, arguing against a troop surge in Afghanistan has been shortlisted for an American Journalism Association Award.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009
Stewart attempted to be selected as the Conservative Party candidate for the Bracknell constituency in the 2010 General Election, but was unsuccessful.
He was also shortlisted as one of three male and three female candidates for the Penrith and the Border constituency open caucus on 25 October 2009. He won the open primary (a process in which any registered voter from the constituency could attend and vote) to become the Parliamentary Candidate for the Conservative Party for the 2010 election. He was returned as the MP for the constituency on 6 May 2010.On 25th July 2010, Stewart apologised to his constituents after he was quoted in the Scottish Sun as saying that "Some areas around here are pretty primitive, people holding up their trousers with bits of twine...".A light hearted Guardian article, "In praise of binder twine" whilst acknowledging the "serious effort" Stewart had made "walking hundreds of miles" to get to know his constituency believed he had simply underestimated the importance of the "ubiquitous and indispensable" twine to the rural community.
On 25 January 2008 Stewart was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs
In August 2008, the UK media widely reported that Studio Canal and Brad Pitt's production company Plan B had bought the rights to a biopic of Stewart's life. The actor Orlando Bloom will apparently play Stewart. That Brad Pitt had bought the rights was confirmed on Lateline, on Australia's ABC on 29 July
On 16 & 23 January 2010, Stewart presented a two part series on "The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia" on BBC2 in the UK
Stewart speaks some French, Persian , and Indonesian. He has also studied at school, in the Foreign Office, and on his Asian travels Latin, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Serbo-Croat, Urdu, and Nepali languages; although he admits, that these later languages are "very rusty"
