On January 7, 1999, my friend and photographer David Guttenfelder took the picture that appears on this page’s banner while we were on assignment in Sierra Leone. I selected this image—in its scratched and imperfect grey tones—because, for me, this photograph is symbolic, historic and metaphoric. 

On January 10, three days after David snapped this picture, a child soldier trained his Kalashnikov at our car and unloaded his clip into the backseat of our car. I was shot in the head, an injury that left me teetering between life and death with a single bullet lodged in the back of my brain.

The boy soldier, three of his comrades and my colleague, Myles Tierney, were all killed in the ensuing firefight. Five lives were snuffed out in the blink of an eye. I’ve spent years (more than two decades, in fact) trying to make sense of that seemingly random outburst of violence.

Why banner this site with a photo from such a horrible time? As I mentioned, the photo marks a symbolic watershed in my 30-year career as a journalist, historian, and writer. It also captures a moment in time, recording one of the darkest periods in Sierra Leone’s history: a history of enslavement, exploitation, violence, corruption, civil war, and “Western” indifference to it all.

To my eye, the photo, in its varying shades of grey, is also a metaphor for one journalist’s evolution away from a simplified black-and-white take on the world to a more mature and nuanced interpretation of global events. And finally, I’ve included this photograph for posterity, in the hope that future generations (pardon my delusions of grandeur) will remember that once upon a time, a journalist named Ian Stewart tried to use his words to make the world just a little better. 

My Backstory

I was born in the suburbs west of Toronto in the spring of 1966. I grew up an avid “jock,” playing baseball and football through high school and university until my sophomore year at Queen’s University when a particularly savage tackle left me with a torn anterior cruciate ligament. But tragedy spawned opportunity [insert overused and inaccurate juxtaposition of Chinese words for “crisis” and “opportunity”]. With my gridiron days over, I began looking for another reason to ditch class (apologies to my parents who ponied up the tuition). I found it in the newsrooms of the Queen’s Journal and later the Kingston Whig-Standard. From then on I was hooked; news was in my blood.

In the early 1990s, I attended Columbia University’s Graduate Journalism School in New York and became enraptured with the idea that eloquent and carefully chosen words could move people to end wars, feed starving children, and insist that governments near and far respect the rights of the person.

That passion eventually paved a path to Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Africa as a bureau chief and correspondent for United Press International and later the Associated Press. 

Throughout the 1990s I reported on many wars; though not necessarily the wars on CNN or the front pages of The New York Times—those post-Vietnam conflicts that involved U.S. troops or NATO airstrikes (Somalia, the Gulf Wars, Bosnia, and Kosovo, among others); these were the wars of “Western” concern, and were inundated with news coverage by the mainstream corporate news establishment. No, my mission, personal as it was, was to shed light on the “small wars,” the forgotten wars, the post-Cold War conflicts: Cambodia after Pol Pot, pre-Bush Afghanistan, the disputed Kashmir region of Pakistan and India, Sri Lanka, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Laurent Kabila’s Democratic Republic of Congo. These were the wars in which people were dying beyond the gaze of most major corporate media outlets. 
My years overseas did not change the world—did I really believe they ever would? At times, however, they did inspire people (one at a time, two or maybe three on good days) to make a change for the better.

It took three rounds of brain surgery and years to rebuild from that shooting back in 1999. Today, with the benefit of hindsight I see that I pushed my recovery to its outer limit. Patience was never my strong point. By 2000 I had already stubbornly resumed my career; a year’s worth of bed rest and therapy was plenty. My impetuousness came with the price of grand mal seizures (four to date). Moreover, the shooting and my time overseas left an indelible mark on my career. No longer content to pile paragraphs, I began writing news analyses and commentaries for the AP, the Globe & Mail in Toronto and other various print and online publications. Although just out of my wheelchair I soon began working on the manuscript to Ambushed, my memoir about life as a foreign correspondent, my injury and my recovery. At the time I rationalized that I had to write the book immediately to capture the raw emotions of my experiences in Africa, which I did. But in retrospect, what the text gained in visceral, almost stream-of-consciousness writing, it lacked in a more reasoned and mature voice that could analyze the events of my life and put them into the larger perspective of my views on journalism and international affairs. It was a lesson well-learned for my future endeavors.    

In 2001 I accepted a John S. Knight fellowship for journalists at Stanford University, where I sought to put the news events of war and violence in Africa into greater historical context. During that time I continued to write commentaries and lecture widely on the same topics. Feeling obliged, I returned briefly to the Associated Press. Finally, by 2007 I returned to graduate school where I earned my doctorate in Anthropology and History. At Michigan, theory ran deep and thick, where canonical literature was used to examine the world. Classroom and textbook-based learning rubbed me the wrong way, running counter to my lofty initial dream to change the world. Sadly I found that writing in the world of academia is an affair of elitist exclusivity. To me, writing and story-telling is such an important part of the human condition. It's who we are, who we've always been since the first stories were told in petroglyph form on the cave walls of the stone age.

In 2013 I joined the faculty of the International Studies Institute at the University of New Mexico, where I worked as the ISI’s Associate Director and taught a variety of classes on International Studies, modernity, labor rights, and Africa. I continue to write; hopefully with greater depth and impact. Indeed, here I am, still dreaming my words may help to make the world just a little bit more thoughtful, informed and better. 

A  Career by the Numbers: