Ian Stewart

Position(s):

Speaker

An award-winning war correspondent, Ian Stewart spent seven of his 15 years as a journalist working in some of the world’s most dangerous places including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cambodia and Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Peninsula. He has witnessed and reported on political assassinations, terrorist bombings, insurgent wars and military coups. Throughout his years overseas, much of Stewart’s work focused on the plight of children caught in the midst of violent circumstances. In the late 1990s he was named The Associated Press’s West Africa bureau chief. From his base in Côte D’Ivoires he travelled throughout the African continent, covering the rise and fall of Laurent Kabila in the former Zaïre, the civil war in Guinea-Bissau, urban fighting in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, and the ongoing war of Sierra Leone’s brutal Revolutionary United Front. The recipient of The Associated Press Managing Editor’s Award for feature writing, he was also a runner-up for the French-based “Bayeux Award for War Reporting” for his work from Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone. In January of 1999 while covering a rebel attack on Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown, Stewart was shot in the head and nearly killed by a teenaged soldier. After several years of rehabilitation in his native Canada he compiled his experiences in Africa in the memoir Ambushed: A War Reporter's Life on the Line. He now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is working on his Ph.D., focusing on the long-term societal and sociological consequences on collectively traumatized communities such as child soldiers in Sierra Leone, Liberia or Uganda.