Roderick James Nugent "Rory" Stewart (born 3 January 1973) is a British academic, broadcaster, writer, and former diplomat and politician. He teaches and co-directs the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Since 2022, Stewart has co-hosted the The Rest Is Politics podcast with Alastair Campbell. Stewart served as a British Member of Parliament between 2010 and 2019, and in the British government, between 2015 and 2019.
Born in British Hong Kong, Stewart attended the Dragon School and Eton College. After a brief period of military service in the Black Watch, Stewart studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating he joined the Foreign Office, holding diplomatic positions in Indonesia and Montenegro. He left the Foreign Office to undertake a solo walk across Asia, which later became the subject of his best-selling book The Places in Between. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Stewart was involved in the Coalition Provisional Authority in the Maysan province. He founded and ran the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, an NGO focused on human development in Afghanistan, before becoming a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. He joined the Conservative Party in 2009.
