John Ruggie

John Ruggie
Professor John Ruggie
Born	John Gerard Ruggie (1944-10-18) 18 October 1944 Graz, Austria
Alma mater	McMaster University and University of California, Berkeley
Occupation	Professor of Political Science

John Gerard Ruggie (born October 18, 1944) is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is also an Affiliated Professor in International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.

Early life and education

Ruggie was born in Graz, Austria, son of Josef and Margaret Ruggie. He was raised in Toronto, Canada.

Ruggie has a BA in politics and history from McMaster University in Canada.

He married Mary Zacharuk in 1965, with whom he has one son.

He moved to the United States in 1967 to attend graduate school. He earned a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Career

Academic appointments

Ruggie taught for many years at Columbia University, becoming Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. He has also taught at the University of California's Berkeley and San Diego campuses and directed the UC system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. He joined the Harvard Kennedy School faculty in 2001.

United Nations work

From 1997 to 2001, Ruggie served as United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Strategic Planning, a post created specifically for him by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He was one of the architects of the United Nations Global Compact. In 2005, he was appointed as the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Business and Human Rights. In that capacity, he developed a set of principles, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which the UN Human Rights Council endorsed unanimously in 2011. These principles are also known as the "Ruggie principles" or the "Ruggie framework".

Scholarly work

Ruggie introduced the concepts of international regimes and epistemic communities into the international relations field; he adapted from Karl Polanyi the term "embedded liberalism" to explain the post-World War II international economic order; and he was a major contributor to the emergence of the constructivist approach to international relations theorizing, which takes seriously the roles of norms, ideas, and identities, alongside other factors, in determining international outcomes. A survey in Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of the 25 most influential international relations scholars in the United States and Canada. His most recent book, Just Business: Multinational Corporations and Human Rights, has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Awards and recognition

Ruggie has a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) from McMaster; and a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) from the University of Waterloo.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ruggie is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has received the International Studies Association's Distinguished Scholar Award and the American Political Science Association's Hubert Humphrey Award for outstanding public service; the AS.K. social science prize from the Wissenschafts Zentrum Berlin; as well as awards from the American Bar Association and the Washington Foreign Law Society, the latter honoring "an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the development and application of international law" for developing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

See also

• International relations theory
• Constructivism in international relations

External links

• John Ruggie's personal website