John Kester is a policy analyst and international journalist in Washington, D.C.
His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, and Washingtonian, and has been cited in Harvard Business Law Review.
Kester has interviewed three former U.S. presidential candidates, foreign dignitaries, and a Nobel laureate. He has been hosted as a speaker by the Washington European Society and other organizations. He has traveled, studied, and worked in nearly fifty countries on five continents. A Washington, D.C. native, he has lived in London, Paris, and Tokyo.
He is familiar with five languages, including native English, advanced Spanish and Japanese, and limited French and Italian.
Kester began his journalism career in 2014 at The Wall Street Journal's New York headquarters, reporting financial and accounting news.
He studied at Georgetown University Law Center, where he focused on international law and graduated with a Juris Doctor and certificate in transnational legal studies in 2013. Kester attended trials of accused war criminals in the Hague at the International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia while studying with the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London. Additionally, he studied comparative international law in a Cornell University program at Le Sorbonne in Paris.
Prior to his legal studies, Kester graduated Colby College with Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History, magna cum laude, with distinction, in 2008. He studied British history, Near East and North African archaeology, Shakespeare, and Chaucer at University College London during two trimesters abroad, and samurai history, Palestine, and astronomy during summers at Harvard University.
Between college and law school, Kester was selected by the Government of Japan as a cultural ambassador and language instructor, and lived for one year in a small farming village in Japan.
Kester briefly interned in Special Ops at the Pentagon in 2006, and was a business consultant to foreign companies in Tokyo at boutique Japan-based firm Investment International Inc. (インベストメントインターナショナル) in 2007.
He enjoys writing, filmmaking, and traveling off the beaten path.
For more formal professional information, please see his résumé.