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A Brown-Bag Luncheon with Sebestyén L. v. Gorka
Executive Director, Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security (ITDIS), Hungary

Sebestyen L. v. Gorka gained national attention in Hungary in 2002 for his outspoken stance as an expert on the parliamentary committee investigating Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy and his past as an officer in the Communist secret police. Since then Sebestyen has been one of the region’s most persistent and vocal advocates of market reforms and individual liberty. He has a bi-weekly column in the national published Demokrata which he uses to communicate the principles of market democracy to Hungarian readers. He also appears regularly in the daily newspapers, on radio, and on national television.

Sebestyen was born in 1970 in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents living in forced exile. His father, the author and architect Paul Gorka, had spent six years as a prisoner of the Communist regime before escaping in the Revolution of 1956. After the fall of Communism, Sebestyen and his parents moved back to Hungary, where he became an internationally recognized expert on defense reform and international terrorism. Since then he has been a Kokkalis Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a consultant to the RAND Corporation in Washington and adjunct professor for Terrorism and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall Center in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

In 2003 Sebestyen and his wife founded the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security (ITDIS) out of the belief that while many of the post-Communist nations were seen as successful graduates of transition, their citizens do not enjoy true economic and political freedom. Moreover, that without far-reaching economic reforms, there will never be true freedom. Recent violent events in Hungary bear out the validity of this belief. As founding director of ITDIS, Sebestyen appears frequently in international media promoting his views on both democracy and how to cope with international terrorism, including the BBC, the Financial Times, Reuters, The Times of London, Jane’s Terrorism Monitor, and Human Events.

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