Richard Ponzio

Director and Senior Fellow, Global Governance, Justice & Security Program

Stimson Center

[email protected]

Richard Ponzio is Director of the Global Governance, Justice & Security Program and a Senior Fellow at Stimson. Previously, he directed the Global Governance Program at The Hague Institute for Global Justice, where (in a partnership with Stimson) he served as Director for the Albright-Gambari Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance. He brings expertise in the areas of global and national democratic institution-building, global political economy, South-Central Asia, and the role of international institutions in responding to state fragility, climate instability, global financial volatility, and population displacement.

Ponzio is formerly a Senior Adviser in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he conceptualized and coordinated Secretary Hillary Clinton’s and later John Kerry’s New Silk Road initiative. Earlier he served as a Senior Strategy and Policy Officer in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, where he initiated a global network of multi/bilateral peacebuilding and stabilization organizations.

From 1999-2009, Ponzio served in a variety of senior policy and strategic planning positions for the United Nations in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands, and New York. From 1997-1999, he was a Visiting Fulbright Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Centre in Islamabad, where his research focused on the governance-security-development nexus in South Asia.

Ponzio has published widely in academic and policy journals (including Global Governance, Foreign Policy, and Survival), edited volumes, newspapers, U.N. policy reports (including national, regional, and global Human Development Reports), and books, including Democratic Peacebuilding: Aiding Afghanistan and other Fragile States (OUP, 2011) and Human Development and Global Institutions: Evolution, Impact, and Reform (Routledge, January 2016, with Dr. Arunabha Ghosh). He serves on the board of the Academic Council on the UN System.

Ponzio completed his doctorate in politics and international relations at the University of Oxford on a Clarendon Scholarship and undertook earlier studies at The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy (M.A.), The Graduate Institute Geneva (M.A.) as a MacJannet Fellow, and Columbia University (B.A).

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