Ian Smillie

Ian Smillie has lived and worked in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Bangladesh. He was a founder of the Canadian NGO, Inter Pares, was Executive Director of CUSO and is a long-time foreign aid watcher and critic. He has worked at Tufts and Tulane Universities and as a development consultant with many Canadian, American and European organizations. He is the author of several books, including The Charity of Nations: Humanitarian Action in a Calculating World (with Larry Minear, 2004) and Freedom from Want; The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC (2009). A book on ‘blood diamonds’ will be published in 2010. Ian Smillie served on a UN Security Council Expert Panel examining the relationship between diamonds and weapons in West Africa, and he helped develop the 48-government ‘Kimberley Process,’ a global certification system to halt the traffic in conflict diamonds. He was the first witness at Charles Taylor’s war crimes trial in The Hague and he chairs the Diamond Development Initiative. Ian Smillie was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2003.