Swanee Hunt

Harvard Book Store and Amnesty International are very pleased to host foreign policy expert and former U.S. Ambassador to Austria SWANEE HUNT as she discusses her most recent work, Worlds Apart: Bosnian Lessons for Global Security, a collection of vignettes seeking to understand the Bosnian War and how its lessons apply to today's foreign policy climate.

Worlds Apart tells of a well-meaning foreign policy establishment often deaf to the voices of everyday people. Its focus is the Bosnian War, but its implications extend to any situation that prompts the consideration of military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Ambassador Swanee Hunt served in Vienna during the Bosnian War and was intimately involved in American policy toward the Balkans. During her tenure as ambassador and after, she made scores of trips throughout Bosnia and the rest of the former Yugoslavia, attempting to understand the costly delays in foreign military intervention. To that end, she had hundreds of conversations with a wide range of politicians, refugees, journalists, farmers, clergy, aid workers, diplomats, soldiers, and others.

In Worlds Apart, Hunt’s eighty vignettes alternate between those living out the war and “the internationals” deciding whether or how to intervene. From these stories, most of which she witnessed firsthand, she draws lessons applicable to conflicts throughout the world. These lessons cannot be learned from afar, Hunt says, with insiders and outsiders working apart. Only by bridging those worlds can we build a stronger paradigm of inclusive international security.

“The slaughter in Bosnia in the 1990s still haunts policymakers everywhere. With Worlds Apart, Swanee Hunt brings us all into the room alongside the decision makers at the center of an international crisis, and she simultaneously draws important lessons from those events for the resolution of future conflicts. It’s a compelling read for anyone motivated to learn those larger lessons from a tragedy that tested the will of the free world.”
—Senator John Kerry, Chair, Senate Foreign Relations Committee