The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies presents
the 10th Annual Kenneth N. Waltz Lecture in International Relations
John Ruggie
Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs,
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
"The Balance of Global Public and Private Power: A Tale of Two Worlds"
Hosted by Richard K. Betts, Director
Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies
"Kenneth Waltz was among the most important theorists of international relations in the past half century. His major books, Man, the State, and War, and Theory of International Politics, remain classics. In this presentation, Professor Ruggie will address how well Waltz’s theory does in assessing current shifts in the global balances of public and private power."
BIO
John Gerard Ruggie is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Affiliated Professor in International Legal Studies at Harvard Law. He has received numerous awards for his scholarship, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The policy impact of his work has been recognized by the A.SK Prize of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the American Bar Association and the Washington Foreign Law Society.
From 1997-2001 he served in the cabinet of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Planning. His responsibilities included overseeing the creation of the UN Global Compact and introducing the Millennium Development Goals, as well as leading Annan’s institutional reform efforts and liaising with the U.S. government. From 2005-2011 he served as Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights, in which capacity he produced the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted unanimously by the Human Rights Council, and which constitute the first global standard in this policy space. His book reflecting on that experience, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights (W.W. Norton), has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. An earlier book, Constructing the World Polity, contributed to the development of the social constructivist approach to the study of international
relations.
