Dr Iain Overton (International Relations MPhil 1997) is an investigative journalist and Executive Director of the non-profit Action On Armed Violence, an organisation which conducts policy-informing research into human rights abuses in conflict. He is the author of two books, Gun Baby Gun (2015) and The Price of Paradise (2019), and teaches at SOAS as an Associate Professor.

“I have probably ended up, over a number of years, reporting in around 80 different countries,” says Iain. “I’ve actually travelled to around 110 countries and reported from about 25 war zones or places of high levels of armed violence.” 

After reading History at Downing College, followed by a brief a stint selling whisky in Asia, Iain came to Gonville & Caius for the International Relations MPhil. 

“I think I was hoping to get recruited to MI6,” he says. “And so, I did the International Relations degree and, duly, was approached by MI6. But I think we realised relatively early on in the recruitment process that we weren’t that compatible. I think my tendency to speak truth to power didn’t resonate.” 

Instead, Iain’s MPhil dissertation, which uncovered evidence of an alleged war crime committed against a Canadian soldier in the First World War, was commissioned as a Channel 4 documentary, and he began a career as an investigative journalist and documentary producer for channels such as BBC and More4. 

“A lot of my work from the BBC onwards has been dictated by a moral philosophy that was honed at Caius,” says Iain. “The human rights angle that I pursued as a postgraduate came back to me again and again.” 

Iain has won a BAFTA, two Amnesty awards, and a Peabody for his journalism. 

He adds: “A lot of my time was spent looking at the front line of human rights abuses in various forms, whether it was femicide in Mexico, or the drug wars of Colombia, or the long burn of the war on terror that I first saw unfold whilst making a documentary on Chechnya back in 2001. We all witnessed 9/11 occurring in the BBC newsroom.” 

During his postgraduate, he was taught by Professor Jay Winter of Pembroke College and Professor David Abulafia, who died this year aged 76 after being a Fellow of Caius for over 51 years. He credits much of his work to the influence of his academic supervisors. 

Indeed, pulling directly from Professor Winter’s reading list, Iain quotes from Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay, ‘On the Concept of History’. Benjamin allegorises Paul Klee’s monoprint Angelus Novus (1920) as a depiction of an Angel of History bearing witness to a continual accretion of human suffering. 

After reading, he says: “That resonated with me so strongly that I slightly feel a lot of my work has been an attempt to recapture the Angel’s vision. To look at the past and see the accumulation of harm from war, from conflicts, from human rights abuses, and to catalogue that as a career.” 

Iain reflects on the value of a postgraduate degree in the humanities in today’s world. 

“Without the moral awakening that I only got as a postgraduate — I didn’t really get it at undergraduate — I wouldn’t have pursued the career that I pursued.

“If you’re learning war reporting simply for the kicks, it fades and you can’t sustain it. But if you are doing it because ultimately you believe, as Benjamin said, that, if the historian doesn’t keep on interrogating the causes of the dead, those who killed the dead will keep on winning — well, I still fervently believe that. 

“I think that a kind of vision of humanism, aligned with a historic purpose, aligned with an investigative directive, were all formed in me at Caius.” 

As such, Iain believes that the impact of a Cambridge education cannot be underestimated. 

He says: “If you have that imagination that’s been sparked at Cambridge, if you can think laterally or differently or counterintuitively, that, I think, makes you the kind of person who can create the next version of the podcast, or the next version of how we consume media. You’ll be pioneering.

“I wish that more graduates would realise that it is them who can change the world. They’ve been given this great opportunity of education to equip them to be world changers. 

“I feel that the long reach of Cambridge has been deeply instructive who I became and who I still hope to become.”