The Struggle for Justice and
the Recovery of Moral Knowledge
Gary Haugen | March 14th, 2024
Gary Haugen's International Justice Mission has partnered with local teams since 1997 to protect over 10 million vulnerable people worldwide from violence, trafficking, and slavery. In this lecture he asked: what gave his global partners the capacity to persevere in prolonged struggles for justice? How are such people formed? And can a contemporary university like UVA form students who will struggle for justice in the world? If a university aspires to form men and women to be great and good, Haugen contended, it must recover the pursuit of moral knowledge.
“Moral knowledge teaches that things do change. Hope, as Jesus taught it, is a powerful discipline of the mind… The university must recover the hard pursuit of moral knowledge if it wants to release into the world students of moral clarity, sacrificial courage, tenacious hope, and refreshing joy.”
— Gary Haugen
Meet the Speaker: Gary Haugen
Gary Haugen is CEO and founder of International Justice Mission. Before founding IJM in 1997, Gary was a human rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, where he focused on crimes of police misconduct. In 1994, he served as the Director of the United Nations’ investigation in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. In this role, he led an international team of lawyers, criminal prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and forensics experts to gather evidence that would eventually be used to bring the perpetrators of the genocide to justice. Gary received a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University, and a J.D. from the University of Chicago.
Gary has been recognized by the U.S. State Department as a Trafficking in Persons “Hero” – the highest honor given by the U.S. government for anti-slavery leadership. His work to protect the poor from violence has been featured by Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Times of India, Forbes, U.S. News and World Report, the Guardian and National Public Radio, among many other outlets. He is the author of several books, including Good News About Injustice (Intervarsity Press) and, most recently, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence (Oxford University Press). Gary was invited to share the themes of The Locust Effect at the annual TED Conference in a talk entitled: The hidden reason for poverty the world needs to address now.