Panelists and Moderators
Geneive Abdo
Fellow, Middle East Program, the Stimson Center
Geneive Abdo is a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a fellow in the Middle East program at the Stimson Center, specializing in issues regarding modern Iran and political Islam. She directs the U.S.-Iran Advisory Group, a program on Iran, in conjunction with the Heinrich Boell Stiftung, North America. She is also the author of the monograph “The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi’a- Sunni Divide,” published in April 2013 by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. She was formerly the liaison officer for the Alliance of Civilizations, a United Nations initiative established by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which aims to improve relations between Islamic and Western societies. Before joining the United Nations, Abdo was a foreign correspondent for 20 years, focusing on coverage of the Middle East and the Muslim world. She was the first American journalist to be based in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and was forced to flee the country after the regime threatened her with prosecution for her articles over the course of three years. Abdo is the author of No God But God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (2000), which documents the social and political transformation of Egypt into an Islamic society; and Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11 (2006), which explains the changing identity among American Muslims as they struggle to remain true to their faith while deciding to what degree they will integrate into American society. Abdo is the co-author of Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First Century Iran (2003), a work that explains the theological struggle in Iran among the Shiite clerics and how this struggle has caused political stagnation. From 2001-02, Abdo was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. That year, she also received the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim award.
Hady Amr MPA ’94
Deputy Assistant Administrator, Bureau for the Middle East, U.S. Agency for International Development
Hady Amr was sworn in as USAID’s deputy assistant administrator for the Middle East in October 2010. Prior to his appointment, he served as the founding director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar and a fellow in foreign policy studies at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. In that capacity, he served as a convener of the annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum, a global event that brings together leaders from the U.S. and across the Muslim world. He also served as a senior adviser in the office of policy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Amr is the author of numerous publications, including “The Opportunity of the Obama Era: Can Civil Society Help Bridge Divides between the United States and a Diverse Muslim World?”, and was the lead author for UNICEF’s “State of the Arab Child” and “The Situation of Children, Youth, and Women in Jordan.” He has contributed regularly to international television broadcasts and has been published by Newsweek, the Washington Post, USA Today and the International Herald Tribune. Over the course of his career, he has worked for or advised various international organizations including the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and UNICEF. As an appointee at the U.S. Department of Defense, he helped establish the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. Amr received a bachelor's degree from Tufts University and his M.P.A. in economics and public and international affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School.
Barbara K. Bodine
Lecturer in Public and International Affairs; Director, Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative, Woodrow Wilson School; former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen
Barbara K. Bodine is a lecturer in public and international affairs and director of the Scholars in the Nation's Service Initiative, an innovative program at the Woodrow Wilson School that recognizes, supports and prepares Princeton students committed to career federal public service through admission to the M.P.A. program, intensive language training, fully-funded internships and two-year fellowships and mentoring. She lectures on U.S. diplomacy in the Persian Gulf region and on Yemen. Bodine's more than 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service were spent primarily on the Arabian Peninsula and greater Persian Gulf issues, specifically U.S. bilateral and regional policy, strategic security issues, counterterrorism, and governance and reform. Her tour as ambassador to the Republic of Yemen from 1997 to 2001 saw enhanced support for democratization and increased security and counterterrorism cooperation, the establishment of a coast guard, resumption of Fulbright scholarships for Yemeni students, initiation of a $40 million-a-year economic assistance and development program, and creation of an indigenous landmine awareness and demining program. Bodine also served in Baghdad as deputy principal officer during the Iran-Iraq War, in Kuwait as deputy chief of mission during the Iraqi invasion and occupation of 1990-91, and, seconded to the Department of Defense, in Iraq in 2003 as the senior State Department official and the first coalition coordinator for reconstruction in Baghdad and the central governorates. In addition to several assignments in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, she was associate coordinator for counterterrorism operations and subsequently acting coordinator for counterterrorism, director of East African affairs, dean of the School of Professional Studies at the Foreign Service Institute, and senior adviser for International Security Negotiations and Agreements in the bureau of political-military affairs. Since leaving government, Bodine has been senior research fellow and director of the Governance Initiative in the Middle East at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership and Institute of Politics, and the Robert Wilhelm Fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies.
L. Carl Brown
Garrett Professor in Foreign Affairs, Emeritus; Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, Princeton University
L. Carl Brown, the Garrett Professor in Foreign Affairs, Emeritus and professor of Near Eastern studies, Emeritus, is a historian of the modern Near East and North Africa with special emphasis on the Arab world. A member of the Princeton faculty from 1966 to 1993, he was long director of the interdisciplinary Program in Near Eastern Studies. He is the author of International Politics in the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game (1984) and Religion and State: The Muslim Approach to Politics (2000); and editor of Centerstage: American Diplomacy Since World War II (1990), and Diplomacy in the Middle East: The International Relations of Regional and Outside Powers (2003).
William J. Burns
Deputy Secretary of State, U.S. Department of State
William Burns holds the highest rank in the Foreign Service, career ambassador, and became deputy secretary of state in July 2011. He is only the second serving career diplomat in history to become deputy secretary. Burns served from 2008 until 2011 as undersecretary for political affairs. He was ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from 2001 until 2005, and ambassador to Jordan from 1998 to 2001. Burns has also served in a number of other posts since entering the Foreign Service in 1982, including executive secretary of the State Department and special assistant to secretaries Christopher and Albright; minister-counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow; acting director and principal deputy director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff; and special assistant to the president and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council staff. Burns earned a B.A. in history from LaSalle University and master’s and doctoral degrees in international relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar. He is the recipient of three honorary doctoral degrees. Burns is the author of Economic Aid and American Policy Toward Egypt, 1955-1981 (1985). He speaks Russian, Arabic and French, and is the recipient of two Presidential Distinguished Service Awards and a number of Department of State awards, including the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award, two Distinguished Honor awards, the 2006 Charles E. Cobb Jr. Ambassadorial Award for Initiative and Success in Trade Development, the 2005 Robert C. Frasure Memorial Award for conflict resolution and peacemaking, and the James Clement Dunn Award. In 1994, he was named to Time magazine’s list of the “50 Most Promising American Leaders Under Age 40” and to Time’s list of “100 Young Global Leaders.”
Thanassis Cambanis MPA ’00
Fellow, The Century Foundation
Thanassis Cambanis is a fellow at The Century Foundation in New York and a journalist who has covered the Middle East for nearly a decade. He is writing a book about the efforts of Egyptian revolutionaries to create a new political order after Hosni Mubarak, which will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2014. His first book, A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel, was published in 2010. Cambanis writes “The Internationalist” column for The Boston Globe’s Ideas section, and is a correspondent for The Atlantic. Cambanis regularly contributes to The New York Times, The Boston Globe (where he served as a foreign correspondent in Iraq and the Middle East), and other publications. He blogs at thanassiscambanis.com. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York City. In 2009 Cambanis served as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Cambanis received his M.P.A. at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School in 2000. He studied history and creative writing for his bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ryan Crocker MCF ’85
U.S. Foreign Service Career Ambassador; Kissinger Senior Fellow at Yale University
Ryan Crocker is currently the first Kissinger Senior Fellow at Yale University (2012-13). He retired from the Foreign Service in April 2009 after a career of more than 37 years but was recalled to active duty by President Obama to serve as ambassador to Afghanistan in 2011. He also has served as ambassador in Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon. Crocker also has served as the international affairs adviser at the National War College, where he joined the faculty in 2003. From May to August 2003, he was in Baghdad as the first director of governance for the Coalition Provisional Authority and was deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from August 2001 to May 2003. Since joining the Foreign Service in 1971, he also has had assignments in Iran, Qatar, Iraq and Egypt, as well as Washington. He was assigned to the American Embassy in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the bombings of the embassy and the Marine barracks in 1983. He received a B.A. in English in 1971 and an honorary doctor of laws degree in 2001 from Whitman College (Washington). Crocker is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the Association of American Ambassadors. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, in 2009. His other awards include the Presidential Distinguished and Meritorious Service awards, the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award, the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Civilian Service and for Distinguished Public Service, the Award for Valor and the American Foreign Service Association Rivkin Award for creative dissent. He received the National Clandestine Service’s Donovan Award in 2009 and the Director of Central Intelligence’s Director’s Award in 2012. In 2011, he was awarded the Marshall Medal by the Association of the United States Army. In January 2002, he was sent to Afghanistan to reopen the American embassy in Kabul. He subsequently received the Robert C. Frasure Memorial Award for “exceptional courage and leadership” in Afghanistan. In September 2004, President Bush conferred on him the personal rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the Foreign Service. In May 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the establishment of the Ryan C. Crocker Award for Outstanding Achievement in Expeditionary Diplomacy. In July 2012, he was named an Honorary Marine, the 75th civilian so honored in the 237-year history of the Corps.
Wolfgang Danspeckgruber
Lecturer of Public and International Affairs; Founding Director, Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, Woodrow Wilson School
Wolfgang Danspeckgruber is the founding director of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination and has been teaching on issues of state, security, self-determination, diplomacy and crisis diplomacy at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics since 1988. He is also founder and chair of the Liechtenstein Colloquium on European and International Affairs, an international private diplomacy forum. From 2008 to 2010 during Austria's membership in the United Nations Security Council, he served as adviser to the Permanent Mission of Austria to the U.N. He also has advised the Permanent Mission of the Principality of Liechtenstein to the U.N. Danspeckgruber researches, writes and teaches on security, strategic, and state building issues in the Caucasus, Central Asia, West South Asia, and the wider Middle East; on theory and practice of international diplomacy, private and crisis diplomacy; the International Criminal Court; and issues concerning religion and diplomacy. Since 2001 he has undertaken research missions in Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Georgia, India (Kashmir), Israel, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and he has been involved in related private diplomacy. Danspeckgruber was educated at the Universities of Linz and Vienna, Austria, (LL.M., D.Laws) and at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland (Ph.D.). He was a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and held fellowships at the Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and at Princeton’s Center of International Studies. His recent books include Robert Gilpin & International Relations – Reflections.
Christopher Eisgruber ’83
Princeton University President-Elect, Provost; Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values
Christopher L. Eisgruber became the provost of Princeton University on July 1, 2004. He is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values. From 2001 through June 2004, he served as director of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs. He is the author of The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process (2007), Religious Freedom and the Constitution (2007; co-authored with Lawrence G. Sager), and Constitutional Self-Government (2001), as well as numerous articles in books and academic journals. Before joining the faculty in 2001, he clerked for Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Justice John Paul Stevens of the United States Supreme Court, and then served for 11 years on the faculty of the New York University School of Law. Eisgruber earned an A.B. magna cum laude in physics from Princeton, and then received a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University, where he obtained an M.Litt. in politics. He holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and is a member of the American Law Institute.
Harold Feiveson MPA ’63, Ph.D. ’72
Senior Research Scientist, Woodrow Wilson School and the Program on Science and Global Security; Lecturer in Public and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School
H.A. Feiveson is a senior research scientist and member of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security of the Woodrow Wilson School. He co-directed the program from its inception in 1974 until 2007. His principal research interests are in the fields of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy policy. He was editor and a principal author of The Nuclear Turning Point: A Blueprint for Deep Cuts and De-alerting of Nuclear Weapons (1999). He has taught regularly at the Wilson School for 37 years on a range of topics including the environment, energy and nuclear arms control. He also has taught regularly a freshman seminar on “Dilemmas in Athletics” and, more recently, “Scientists against Time – the Role of Allied Scientists in WWII.” Before coming to Princeton, he was a member of the science bureau of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1963 to 1967. He was one of the founders of the international journal Science & Global Security and was editor during the first 21 years of the journal, until 2010. He is one of the academic fellows for the men’s basketball team.
Amaney Jamal
Associate Professor of Politics; Director, Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, Princeton University
Amaney Jamal is associate professor of politics at Princeton University and director of the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice. Her interests include the study of Muslim and Arab Americans and the pathways that structure their patterns of civic engagement in the U.S. The focus of her current research is democratization and the politics of civic engagement in the Arab world. Jamal’s books include Barriers to Democracy, which explores the role of civic associations in promoting democratic effects in the Arab world (winner of the 2008 APSA Best Book Award in comparative democratization); and, as coauthor, Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (2007) and Citizenship and Crisis: Arab Detroit after 9/11 (2009). Her latest book, Of Empires and Citizens, was just published by Princeton University Press. In addition to her role as director of Princeton’s Workshop on Arab Political Development, Jamal is a co-director of Princeton’s Luce Project on Migration, Participation, and Democratic Governance in the U.S., Europe, and the Muslim World; principal investigator of the Arab Barometer Project, winner of the Best Dataset in the Field of Comparative Politics (Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Dataset Award, 2010); co-principal investigator of the Detroit Arab American Study, a sister survey to the Detroit Area Study; and senior adviser on the Pew Research Center projects focusing on Islam in America (2006) and Global Islam (2010). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. In 2005, Jamal was named a Carnegie Scholar.
Theodore H. Kattouf MCF ’83
President and CEO, AMIDEAST; former U.S. Ambassador to United Arab Emirates and Syria
Following graduation from Pennsylvania State University, Ted Kattouf served 3-1/2 years in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of captain. In 1972, he joined the U.S. Foreign Service, embarking on a 30-year career that included postings to Iraq, Kuwait, Yemen and Saudi Arabia as well as service as U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates from 1998 to 2001 and Syria from 2001 to 2003. He pursued mid-career graduate studies at the Woodrow Wilson School and received numerous distinctions, including the Cobb Award for outstanding advocacy on behalf of U.S. companies, four Senior Performance Awards, and one Presidential Honor Award. As president and CEO of Washington, DC-based AMIDEAST since 2003, he has overseen a tripling of the size of this leading provider of training, educational exchange and development services in the Middle East and North Africa, and a quadrupling of its endowment. Kattouf is the recipient of the 2012 Najeeb Halaby Award for Public Service.
Mirjam Künkler
Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton
Mirjam Künkler joined the Department of Near Eastern Studies in 2007. Her research interests are in the politics of law and religion in Iran and Indonesia. She has completed a book manuscript on social movements, Islamic thought and political reform in Indonesia and Iran, and is currently working on a book that analyzes the role of law in structuring regime-opposition relations in the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979-2009). In addition, her broader comparative interests include political and constitutional thought in Iran and Indonesia, and female religious authority in 20th century Iran. Künkler is the co-convener of a two-year Oxford-Princeton research cluster on “Traditional authority and transnational religious networks in contemporary Shi‘i Islam,” and co-principal investigator of the "Iran Social Science Data Project" funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Beginning in fall 2013, she will lead a research cluster on “Religion and Constitutionalism” at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bielefeld (ZIF). She is the trustee for Princeton University to the American Institute for Iranian Studies (AIIrS), a member of the board of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS), and a member of the MESA Committee on Academic Freedom. Künkler has been a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Social Science, University of Tehran, Iran; the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta; the Islamic State University (UIN), Alauddin Makassar (Sulawesi), Indonesia; the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISJ), Spain; the Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Society at the Free University in Berlin; the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB); and the politics department at the University of Oxford. Before joining Princeton, Künkler served as the deputy director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion at Columbia University.
Daniel C. Kurtzer
S. Daniel Abraham Visiting Professor in Middle Eastern Policy Studies; former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt and Israel
Daniel C. Kurtzer served from 2001 to 2005 as the U.S. ambassador to Israel and from 1997 to 2001 as the U.S. ambassador to Egypt. He served as a political officer at the American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv, deputy director of the office of Egyptian affairs, speechwriter on the policy planning staff, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, and principal deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. Throughout his career, Kurtzer was instrumental in formulating and executing U.S. policy toward the Middle East peace process. He crafted the 1988 peace initiative of Secretary of State George P. Shultz and in 1991 served as a member of the U.S. peace team that brought about the Madrid Peace Conference. Subsequently, he served as coordinator of the multilateral peace negotiations and as the U.S. representative in the multilateral refugee working group. He has two recently released books on the Middle East peace process: The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace 1989-2011, co-authored with Bill Quandt, Scott Lasensky, Steve Spiegel, and Shibley Telhami; and Pathways to Peace: America and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, as editor.
Bruce W. MacDonald MPA ’73
Adjunct Professor, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; Senior Adviser, Arms Control and Nonproliferation Project, United States Institute of Peace
Bruce MacDonald is an independent consultant providing technology and policy management services to government and the private sector and serves as senior adviser to the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Arms Control and Nonproliferation Project. He lectures on strategic posture and space/cyber security issues at the USIP Academy and is leading a study on crisis stability in space. He is an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and also serves as adjunct senior fellow for national security technology at the Federation of American Scientists. MacDonald was senior director to the U.S. Strategic Posture Review Commission, a bipartisan body headed by former defense secretaries Perry and Schlesinger. He was project leader and final report author for the Council on Foreign Relations’ study of China, space weapons and U.S. security. MacDonald was assistant director for national security at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and served as senior director for science and technology on the National Security Council staff. Previously, he was a professional staff member of the House Armed Services Committee and senior national security adviser to Senator Dale Bumpers. He also worked at the State Department as a nuclear weapons, space and technology specialist in the bureau of politico-military affairs, where he chaired the Interagency START Policy Working Group, served on the U.S. START delegation in Geneva, and also dealt with space and missile defense issues. MacDonald graduated with honors in aerospace engineering from Princeton and received two master’s degrees from Princeton, one in aerospace engineering/rocket propulsion and the other in public and international affairs. MacDonald is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Robert Malley
Program Director, Middle East and North Africa, International Crisis Group
Robert Malley is the program director of Middle East and North Africa for the International Crisis Group, an independent, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflict. In his role, Malley directs analysts based in Amman, Cairo, Beirut, Tel Aviv and Baghdad. Together they report on the political, social and economic factors affecting the risk of conflict and make policy recommendations to address these threats. The team covers events from Iran to Morocco, with a heavy focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the situation in Iraq, and Islamist movements throughout the region. Malley also covers developments in the United States that affect policy toward the Middle East. He served as special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs (1998-2001); as executive assistant to Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser (1996-98); and as director for democracy, human rights and humanitarian affairs, National Security Council (1994-96).
George J. Mitchell
U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, 2009-2011; Former U.S. Senator
George Mitchell served as U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace from January 2009 to May 2011. Prior to that Mitchell had a distinguished career in public service. He was a U.S. senator from Maine from 1980 to 1995 and was Senate majority leader from 1989 to 1995. In 1995, he served as a special adviser to President Clinton on Ireland, and from 1996 to 2000 he served as the independent chairman of the Northern Ireland Peace Talks. Under his leadership the Good Friday Agreement, a historic accord ending decades of conflict, was agreed to by the governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom and the political parties of Northern Ireland. For his service in Northern Ireland, Mitchell received numerous awards and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor given by the U.S. government. In 2000 and 2001, at the request of President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, Mitchell served as chairman of an international fact-finding committee on violence in the Middle East. The committee’s recommendation, widely known as the Mitchell Report, was endorsed by the Bush administration, the European Union and many other governments. Mitchell received an undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and a law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center. He served in Berlin, Germany, as an officer in the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps from 1954 to 1956. From 1960 to 1962 he was a trial lawyer in the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. From 1962 to 1965 he served as executive assistant to Senator Edmund Muskie. In 1965 he returned to Maine, where he engaged in the private practice of law in Portland until 1977. He was then appointed U.S. attorney for Maine, a position he held until 1979, when he was appointed U.S. District Judge for Maine. He resigned that position in 1980 to accept appointment to the U.S. Senate. Mitchell is the author of four books. With his colleague, Senator Bill Cohen of Maine, he wrote Men of Zeal, describing the Iran-Contra investigation. In 1990, Mitchell wrote World on Fire, describing the threat of the greenhouse effect and recommending steps to curb it. His next book, published in 1997, was Not For America Alone: The Triumph of Democracy and The Fall of Communism. And in 1999 he wrote Making Peace, an account of his experience in Northern Ireland.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian
Associate Research Scholar, Woodrow Wilson School and the Program on Science and Global Security
Seyed Hossein Mousavian is a former diplomat who served as Iran’s ambassador to Germany (1990-97), as head of the Foreign Relations Committee of Iran’s National Security Council (1997-2005), and as spokesman for Iran in its nuclear negotiations with the European Union (2003-05). He has taught at the Islamic Azad University (Tehran), served as vice president of Iran’s Center for Strategic Research (Tehran), and was the editor-in-chief of the Tehran Times. Mousavian earned a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Kent in the U.K. His research focuses on options for resolving the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program through diplomacy and improving U.S.-Iran relations. He is author of The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir, published in June 2012 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Michael O’Hanlon ’82, MA ’88, Ph.D. ’91
Visiting Lecturer in Public and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School; Director of Research and Senior Fellow, the Brookings Institution
Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and director of research for the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American foreign policy. He lectures at Princeton, Columbia and Johns Hopkins universities and is a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. O'Hanlon was an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1994. He also worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses. His Ph.D. from Princeton is in public and international affairs; his bachelor's and master's degrees, also from Princeton, are in the physical sciences. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Congo/Kinshasa (the former Zaire) from 1982 to 1984, where he taught college and high school physics in French. His most recent books are Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy (with Martin S. Indyk and Kenneth G. Lieberthal, 2012) and Healing the Wounded Giant (forthcoming, May 2013).
Robert C. Orr MPA ’92, Ph.D. ’96
Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Planning, United Nations
Robert C. Orr has served as assistant secretary-general in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General since 2004 and is the principal adviser and leader of the secretary-general’s initiatives on climate change, energy, global health, food security and partnership. Orr joined the United Nations from Harvard University, where he served as the executive director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government. Prior to this, he served as director of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and director of Global and Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council in the White House. Orr received his Ph.D. and M.P.A. in international relations from the Woodrow Wilson School, and his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He speaks Spanish and Mandarin.
Cecilia E. Rouse
Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; Lawrence and Shirley Katzman and Lewis and Anna Ernst Professor in the Economics of Education
Cecilia Rouse began her tenure as the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School on September 1, 2012. Rouse was the founding director of the Princeton University Education Research Section and is a member of the National Academy of Education and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her primary research interests are in labor economics, with a focus on the economics of education. In 1998-99, she served at the National Economic Council in the White House, and from 2009 to 2011 she was a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. Rouse has served as an editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and is currently a senior editor of The Future of Children. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, where she also did her undergraduate work.
Rexon Y. Ryu MPA ’99
Deputy to the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Department of State
Rexon Y. Ryu currently serves as deputy to the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Susan Rice. Ryu provides advice and assists with the formulation of U.S. foreign policy toward the United Nations, and participates as the representative of the ambassador and the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in the sub-cabinet, deputy-level U.S. foreign policy making process. From March 2009 through July 2011, Ryu served as director for nonproliferation on the national security staff of the White House. His responsibilities covered U.S. nonproliferation policy in Asia and the Middle East, with particular focus on North Korea and Iran. During the transition of President-elect Obama, Ryu led the confirmation team for Rice’s appointment as ambassador to the U.N. From 2005 to 2009, Ryu served as the deputy chief of staff and senior foreign policy adviser for U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel. From 1999 to 2005, Ryu held various positions in the Department of State, including special assistant to then-Deputy Secretary Richard L. Armitage, senior political officer on the Iraq desk in the bureau of Near Eastern affairs, executive assistant to Ambassador John Wolf, the U.S. Roadmap Envoy in Jerusalem, and senior nonproliferation officer for Iraq and Iran issues in the nonproliferation bureau. Ryu received his M.P.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School and his B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
David E. Sanger
Chief Washington Correspondent, The New York Times
David Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times and has reported from New York, Tokyo and Washington, covering a wide variety of issues surrounding foreign policy, globalization, nuclear proliferation and Asian affairs. Soon after joining the Times in 1982, Sanger began specializing in the confluence of economic and foreign policy, and wrote extensively on how issues of national wealth and competitiveness have come to redefine the relationships between the United States and its major allies. As a correspondent and then bureau chief in Tokyo for six years, he covered Japan’s rise as the world’s second largest economic power, and then its humbling recession. He also filed frequently from Southeast Asia, and wrote many of the first stories about North Korea’s secret nuclear weapons program in the 1990’s. Leaving Asia in 1994, Mr. Sanger took up the position of chief Washington economic correspondent, and covered a series of global economic upheavals, from Mexico to the Asian economic crisis. He was named a senior writer in March 1999 and White House correspondent later that year. Sanger joined the Times in the Business Day section, specializing in the computer industry and high-technology trade. In 1986 he played a major role in the team that investigated the causes of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, writing the first stories about what the space agency knew about the potential flaws in the shuttle’s design and revealing that engineers had raised objections to launching the shuttle. The team won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. He was a member of another Pulitzer-winner team that wrote about the struggles within the Clinton administration over controlling exports to China. Sanger has written two books on U.S. foreign policy. His first book was The New York Times best-seller, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power (2009), based on his seven years as the Times White House correspondent, covering two wars, the confrontations with Iran, North Korea and other states that are described in Western media as “rogue” states, and America’s efforts to deal with the rise of China. Sanger’s second book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (2012), is an account of how Obama has dealt with those challenges, relying on innovative weapons and reconfigured tools of American power. Sanger appears regularly on public affairs and news shows. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.
Steven N. Simon MPA ’83
Executive Director of International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)–United States; Corresponding Director of IISS–Middle East
Steven Simon is executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies–U.S. and corresponding director of IISS–Middle East. IISS is a world-leading authority on global security, political risk and military conflict. Until the beginning of 2013, Simon served on the National Security Staff at the White House, where he was the senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs. Prior to reentering government service in early 2011, he was principal and senior adviser to Good Harbor Consulting LLC in Abu Dhabi, which advises the Court of the Crown Prince and key agencies on security matters, as well as adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Goldman Sachs visiting professor at Princeton University. Before this, he was Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow in Middle Eastern Studies at the CFR and adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Before joining CFR, Simon specialized in Middle Eastern affairs within the RAND Corporation. He came to RAND from London, where he was the deputy director of the IISS and Carol Deane senior fellow in U.S. security studies. During this period, he was involved in U.S. counterterrorism policy and operations as well as security policy in the Near East and South Asia. These assignments followed a 15-year career at the U.S. Department of State. Simon has a B.A. from Columbia University in classics and Near Eastern languages, a master’s degree in theological studies in New Testament and Christian origins from the Harvard Divinity School, and an M.P.A. from Princeton. He was a university fellow at Brown University, an international affairs fellow at Oxford University, and a Bosch Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Griff Witte ’00
Lecturer, the Council of Humanities; Ferris Professor of Journalism, Princeton University; Former Deputy Foreign Editor, The Washington Post
From 2010 to 2013, Griff Witte was deputy foreign editor of The Washington Post, overseeing a staff of 20 correspondents around the globe. Witte previously served stints as the Post’s bureau chief in Kabul, Islamabad and Jerusalem. He covered the downfall of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and the Egyptian revolution. Before joining the Post, Witte was a reporter for The Miami Herald. He also served as researcher/reporter for Steve Coll’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Since joining the Post in 2003, Witte has reported for the metro and business sections, in addition to foreign. He makes regular reporting trips to Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East, and has edited the Post’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of Iraq. He was appointed deputy foreign editor in August 2010, after serving as the paper’s Middle East and Asia editor. In the fall of 2011, Witte taught a graduate-level course on international reporting at Georgetown University. He is serving as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton this spring.
Tamara Cofman Wittes
Director and Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, the Brookings Institution
Tamara Cofman Wittes served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs from November 2009 to January 2012, coordinating U.S. policy on democracy and human rights in the Middle East for the State Department. Wittes also oversaw the Middle East Partnership Initiative and served as deputy special coordinator for Middle East transitions. She was central to organizing the U.S. government's response to the Arab awakening. Before joining the State Department, Wittes was a senior fellow in the Saban Center at Brookings, where she directed the Middle East Democracy and Development Project. In that capacity, Wittes conducted research into political and economic reform in the Middle East region as well as U.S. efforts to promote democracy there. Before joining the Saban Center in December 2003, Wittes served as Middle East specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace and as director of programs at the Middle East Institute in Washington. She also taught courses in international relations and security studies at Georgetown University. Wittes was one of the first recipients of the Rabin-Peres Peace Award, established by President Clinton in 1997. Wittes is the author of Freedom’s Unsteady March: America’s Role in Building Arab Democracy (2008). She is also editor of How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Oslo Peace Process (2005). She holds a B.A. in Judaic and Near Eastern studies from Oberlin College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Women in International Security.
Keren Yarhi-Milo
Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School
Keren Yarhi-Milo is an assistant professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Politics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School. Her research and teaching focus on international relations and foreign policy, with a particular specialization in international security, including foreign-policy decision making, interstate communication and crisis bargaining, intelligence, and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Yarhi-Milo’s forthcoming book, Knowing the Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence Organizations, and Assessments of Intentions in International Relations, explores how and why civilian leaders and intelligence organizations select and interpret an adversary’s signals of intentions differently. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly, International Security (forthcoming), and Security Studies (forthcoming). Before joining the faculty at Princeton, she was a post-doc fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a pre-doc fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard. Yarhi-Milo has worked at the Mission of Israel to the United Nations and served in the Israeli Defense Forces, Intelligence Branch. She received the Kenneth N. Waltz Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in the field of international security and arms control in 2010. She also has received awards for the study of political science from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Arthur Ross Foundation, and the Morris Abram Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A., summa cum laude, in political science from Columbia University.