John Gerard Ruggie

Authored for Print issue Vol 48.1 Contemporary Issues in World Trade published in 1994-95

Professor 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 is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and has received numerous academic awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

From 1997-2001 he served in the cabinet of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Planning. From 2005-2011 he was the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Business & Human Rights and produced the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted unanimously by the Human Rights Council. His book reflecting on that experience, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights, 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.