Swanee Hunt

Ambassador Swanee Hunt is founder and chair of Hunt Alternatives Fund, a private foundation advancing innovative and inclusive approaches to social change at local, national, and global levels.  In addition, she is director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she also teaches.

During her tenure as US Ambassador to Austria (1993-97), Hunt hosted negotiations and international symposia in Vienna and Sarajevo to focus efforts on securing the peace in the neighboring Balkan states. Building on her extensive work with US non-governmental organizations, she became a specialist in the role of women in post-communist Europe, leading to the July 1997 “Vital Voices: Women in Democracy” conference of 320 women leaders in business, law, and politics, and the film documentary “Voices.” Her work in Europe prefaced the creation of Women Waging Peace, which advocates for the full participation of women in formal and informal peace processes worldwide.

Ambassador Hunt is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; she has authored articles for American and international newspapers and professional journals including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Denver Post, and Dallas Morning News and writes a nationally syndicated column for Scripps Howard News Service. Her book, This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, was published by Duke University Press in October 2004.