His work as a journalist brought the reality of ethnic cleansing to millions of readers. His writings laid the intellectual basis for the controversial right to protect. Support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq branded him as an interventionist. As a politician he hopes to lead Canada’s Liberals to power.

Watch an interview of Ignatieff, in which he outlines his support for the war in Iraq.THE INTERVENTIONIST
“In March 1999, I sat on a hillside in Macedonia and watched Kosovars streaming into a new refugee camp, and I thought: this has to stop, and if it takes bombing to stop this, then let’s bomb Belgrade,” Ignatieff told a crowd at Concordia University, explaining how he became an advocate of intervention in the defense of human rights.
He was appointed to the International Commission on Kosovo, which was charged with defining a framework for future NATO-led humanitarian efforts.
In 2001, Ignatieff contributed to Canada’s effort to create international political and legal guidelines for humanitarian interventions, later renamed the “Responsibility to Protect Doctrine.”
He also argued for the humanitarian reasons to support the war on Iraq. “I had been in Halabja, Iraq, in 1992, where Saddam dropped poison gas on the Kurds. I had toured the Kurdish villages he had dynamited. I was certain of one thing: Saddam had to go,” Ignatieff explained.
“So, I supported the war, and it was a good reason to do it,” he said.
Shocked by how many Iraqis had died, Ignatieff acknowledged in 2005 that he had gotten Iraq wrong and withdrew his much-criticized support for the war.
He still supports Canada’s intervention in Afghanistan.
Ignatieff speaks of negotiating the thin balance between freedom and security in our video.THE INTELLECTUAL
Michael Ignatieff is considered to be one of the world’s leading intellectuals as well as one of the most influential voices in the contemporary debate on human rights.
For years, his position as Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government—which he left in 2005 to run for office in Canada—gave him an influential platform from which he could shape the global conversation about human rights.
His experiences as a reporter and his journalistic writing style, when combined with his solid foundations as a historian, have made his books international bestsellers.
In addition to this mass appeal, Ignatieff has been able to articulate big ideas that have spurred hot debates in the human rights community, where he is both revered and loathed for his controversial positions.
Politicians and academics on both the right and the left have used his concepts like the responsibility to protect and the theory of the lesser evil to explain, criticize or justify the most important conflicts of the last decades.
He defends himself, saying that human rights cannot be seen as a secular religion. Instead, they must be understood in their political context.
In a filmed interview, Ignatieff explains why it’s wrong to see him as a right-wing politician.THE POLITICIAN
Michael Ignatieff has surprised some people by the speed of his transformation from academia to politics. But politics runs in the family, as he documented in his book Family Album.
Forty years ago, the young Ignatieff was campaigning for the charismatic Pierre Trudeau, to whom Ignatieff is sometimes compared.
In 2006, he was elected as a member of parliament for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, west of Toronto. That same year, after losing a tight race for the leadership of the Liberal Party, he was appointed as deputy leader of the opposition.
Ignatieff-the-politician has attracted lots of attention, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. He arrived late to his own nomination meeting; argued contradictory positions after the 2006 Israeli bombing of Lebanon; and, of course, angered many with his controversial positions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Not every Canadian—or even every member of the Liberal Party—is impressed with the splash Ignatieff has made since entering politics. Many see him as moving too fast, too soon; as showing insufficient respect for the established Liberal leadership; and as being too nakedly ambitious.
Although Ignatieff is probably guilty on all counts, he recently revived his effort to become the leader of the Liberal Party—and, perhaps, prime minister of Canada some day.
Watch Ignatieff talk about the importance of seeing things with your own eyes.THE JOURNALIST
During the 1990s, Ignatieff earned an international reputation through his work as a journalist in the former Yugoslavia. Until he became a politician in 2006, he was also a regular contributor to the New York Times.
His coverage of the Balkan Wars as a reporter for the BBC and Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail shaped the foundation for his future work as a public intellectual and human rights activist.
In the Balkans, he was confronted with the possibility of just staring at his reporter’s notebook and doing his job objectively, or taking a stand.
So, he came up with a theory that he explained in his books about the ethnic wars: Blood and Belonging, The Warrior’s Honor and Virtual War.
This theory, based on Freud’s idea of the narcissism of differences, was that ethnic cleansing was not the result of ancient hatred but produced by the fear of a loss of control resulting from mixture, intermixing and blurring of difference.
In 1995, he wrote his award-winning book Blood and Belonging: Journeys in to the New Nationalism, in which he explored the many faces and dangers of ethnic and nationalistic politics.
The book catapulted him into the international arena as one of the most important human rights scholars.

The Family Album
One of Ignatieff’s grandfathers was the czar’s last minister of education and fled Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power; another grandfather was a leading British academic.
After Ignatieff’s family moved from Europe to Canada, his father (who was a diplomat) served as president of the United Nations Security Council and as an ambassador to Yugoslavia, among other posts. Years later, Ignatieff would return to Yugoslavia record the ethnic massacres that followed the country’s dissolution.

Canadians in Afghanistan
Faithful to his idea of intervening for humanitarian reasons, Ignatieff is still one of the few opposition politicians who back the presence of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.
His position is highly controversial because of the mounting death toll, currently at 82 Canadian soldiers.

War in Iraq
Ignatieff believes that “war” is a misnomer for what is going on when roadside bombs in Afghanistan kill Canadian soldiers: “That is not war, it is a terrorist act.”
“‘War’ is not the right word because you cannot defeat terrorism unless you change people’s minds. This means diplomacy, politics, culture, arguments, persuasion, force,” Ignatieff said. “I just mentioned five things before using the word force.”

Secular Religion
Human rights activists tend to work with absolutes. Ignatieff has tried to introduce all kinds of gray areas into the discussion. He criticizes advocates who elevate human rights to a sort of “secular religion.”
Ignatieff thinks that a narrow, absolutist definition of human rights—instead of one that recognizes historical and political context—blocks real discussion and, even more importantly, effective protection of those very rights.

Theory of the Lesser Evil
In 2004, Michael Ignatieff published The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, propelling him into the center of a huge controversy.
In the post-9/11 world, Ignatieff argued that Western democracies have to resort to “lesser evils” like harsh interrogation techniques (but not torture), the indefinite detention of enemies or even targeted assassinations to protect themselves from the “bigger evil” of terrorism.
This and his support for the war in Iraq—which he considered a “lesser evil”—made him a target of fierce criticism.

Narcissism of Differences
When Michael Ignatieff rediscovered Sigmund Freud’s theory that “the smaller the real differences between people the larger these differences loom in their imaginations and in their fears,” something clicked in his mind.
He did not accept the mainstream view that ethnic cleansing was the result of ancient hatred. He thought, instead, that it was produced by “the fear of contamination and loss of dominance and control resulting from mixture, intermixing and blurring of difference.”

Blood and Belonging
In 1993, Michael Ignatieff traveled and reported in Quebec, the Ukraine, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia to produce “Blood and Belonging: Journeys in to the New Nationalism” for the BBC. This award-winning television series explored the problems with politics that deal with nationalism and ethnicity.
Two years later, Ignatieff published a book with the same name.