Jerry White is an entrepreneurial activist who shares in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. He now serves as executive director of the United Religions Initiative (uri.org), the world’s largest grassroots interfaith network promoting peace, justice, and healing in more than 110 countries. Jerry is known for leading high-impact campaigns, three of which led to international treaties: the Landmine Ban Treaty; the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and the Cluster Munitions Ban. When he was twenty, Jerry lost his lower right leg to a landmine explosion while hiking in Israel, and later worked closely with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, and then Queen Noor of Jordan to demine the Holy Land and help thousands of war victims get legs, get jobs, and get on with their lives.
Jerry wrote about how to move from victimhood to survivorship in his first book, Getting Up When Life Knocks You Down. In his sole stint in government, Jerry was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary to launch the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, introducing advanced decision analytics to predict the outcomes of complex negotiations. A Senior Ashoka Fellow, Jerry studied religion at Brown University, theology at Cambridge University, and received his MBA from the University of Michigan. He has honorary degrees from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Glasgow Caledonia University, and taught for seven years on politics and religion as a Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia.
His latest book, co-authored with Dr. Georgette Bennett, is Religicide: Confronting the Roots of Anti-Religious Violence.
