John P. Hartley is a scholar-diplomat based at Yale University. Executive Director of Pathways for Mutual Respect, serves as Chair of Evangelicals for Peace, directs a global task force for the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) and serves on the Steering Team of the Center for Track 2 Diplomacy and Religious Freedom at the Rivendell Institute.

John’s work aims to cultivate moral imagination and empower shrewd and transformative leadership across social boundaries typically associated with tension and conflict. He got his start in the work of reconciliation and conflict transformation amidst the Liberian civil wars. He has lived, served, consulted and conducted research in more than 20 countries of Africa, Asia, Europe and North America in the 20 years since.

He was the first American to graduate from an Iranian university since the Islamic Revolution. This gives him particularly unique perspective on issues related to Iran. John’s scholarship emphasizes struggles over symbolic authority that give shape to competing styles of religious habitus within faith communities and so enrich (and degrade) communal and common goods in social and political life. At Yale, John is appointed in the Department of Sociology, convenes the Initiative on Religion, Politics and Society and works closely with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. John represents the WEA at the United Nations on matters related to Nuclear Weapons and Disarmament.

 He holds a PhD in Sociology from Yale, an MA in Iranian History from the University of Isfahan, and a BA in International Relations from the University of California at Davis.