2012 conference participants

Elliott Abrams

Elliott Abrams is senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, D.C. He served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser in the administration of President George W. Bush, where he supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East for the White House. Mr. Abrams served in the State Department during all eight years of the Reagan Administration, as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, then as assistant secretary for human rights and humanitarian affairs, and finally as assistant secretary for inter-American affairs. He is the author of Undue Process, Security and Sacrifice, and Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America. Mr. Abrams also writes about U.S. foreign policy, with special focus on the Middle East and democracy and human rights issues, on his CFR blog,"Pressure Points."

John Agresto

John Agresto is the chair of the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board of Trustees of the American University of Iraq, where he previously served as the university's interim chancellor and provost. From 2003 to 2004, Dr. Agresto was the senior advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq. As the representative of the CPA to the Ministry of Higher Education, he was responsible for assisting the Iraqi ministry, universities, and vocational colleges in physical rehabilitation, intellectual renewal, curricular reform, and the establishment of scholarship and exchange programs. Dr. Agresto was president of St. John's College from 1989-2000, and assistant, deputy, and acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1982-1989. He is also the author of numerous publications, including Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions.

Karan Bhatia

Karan Bhatia serves as vice president and senior counsel of global government affairs and policy for General Electric. In this role, he oversees GE's engagement on public policy issues with governments around the world, and works to expand the company's presence in global markets. Before joining GE, Bhatia served as deputy U.S. trade representative, a presidential appointment with the rank of ambassador, overseeing U.S. international trade policy with respect to Asia and Africa. Specific achievements include negotiating the landmark U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, concluding the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral WTO Accession Agreement, founding the U.S.-India Trade Policy Forum, and supervising the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade. He also served as assistant secretary for aviation and international affairs at the U.S. Department of Transportation from 2003-2005. Bhatia has written and spoken widely on international trade and transportation policy, taught at Georgetown University Law Center, and testified on many occasions before Congress.

Nicholas Burns

Nicholas Burns is the Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, director of the Future of Diplomacy Project, and faculty chair for the Programs on the Middle East and on India and South Asia. Professor Burns was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2005 to 2008; the State Department's third-ranking official when he led negotiations on the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement and a long-term military assistance agreement with Israel; and the lead U.S. negotiator on Iran's nuclear program. He was U.S. ambassador to NATO (2001-2005) and to Greece (1997-2001) and State Department spokesman (1995-1997). He worked for five years (1990-1995) on the National Security Council at the White House, where he was senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia Affairs and special assistant to President Clinton and director for Soviet affairs in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

Scott Carpenter

J. Scott Carpenter is the principal of Google Ideas, a "think/do" tank at Google. He is also an adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he was the founding director of Project Fikra, which focuses on empowering Arab democrats in their struggle against extremism. From 2004 to 2007, Carpenter served as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Previously, as director of the governance group for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, he helped guide Iraq's postwar political transition and initiated a wide array of democracy initiatives. Before serving in Iraq, Mr. Carpenter was deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, where he was the bureau's point person on a number of countries critical to U.S. democracy promotion and human rights policy.

Anthony Cordesman

Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is a recipient of the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal. During his time at CSIS, he has completed a wide variety of studies. Cordesman has traveled frequently to Afghanistan and Iraq to consult for MNF-I, ISAF, U.S. commands, and U.S. embassies on the wars in those countries. He frequently acts as a consultant to the U.S. State Department, Defense Department, and intelligence community and has worked with U.S. officials on counterterrorism and security areas in a number of Middle East countries. Before joining CSIS, Cordesman served as director of intelligence assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and as civilian assistant to the deputy secretary of defense. He is the author of a wide range of studies on energy policy, national security, and the Middle East.

Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond also serves as the Peter E. Haas Faculty Co-Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant (and previously was co-director) at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His latest book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World, explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the prospects for future democratic expansion. Diamond served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and has since written extensively on U.S. policy in Iraq and the wider challenges of post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction.

Nadia Diuk

Nadia Diuk serves as vice president of programs for Europe, Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a private nonprofit organization funded by the U.S. Congress to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts. Prior to her appointment as vice president, she supervised NED programs in what was then known as Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union -- a complex region where most democrats could work only underground. She developed programs and strategies for this region through the period of the first free elections of 1989-92, up to the present time of the transitions to independence in the new states of Eurasia as well as assisting those democrats who continue to work in authoritarian countries in that region. Prior to her appointment at the NED, Diuk taught at Oxford University. Diuk has published widely and frequently appears in a wide range of news outlets.

Barrie Freeman

Barrie Freeman is the National Democratic Institute's director for North Africa, overseeing programs in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania to strengthen democratic practices and institutions. She has conducted political assessments and observed elections in over a dozen countries, including recent elections in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. Freeman joined NDI in 2002 as deputy regional director for Central and West Africa, where she managed a diverse portfolio of programs across the region focusing on support to electoral processes, civil society and legislative strengthening, political party development, and the promotion of women and youth in politics. She is the co-author of Transparency and Accountability in Africa's Extractive Industries: The Role of the Legislature. Before joining NDI, Freeman spent 15 years with the U.S. State Department, working in the political, economic and consular sections of U.S. embassies in Lesotho, Morocco, Nigeria and Tunisia.

Danya Greenfield

Danya Greenfield is the deputy director of the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council. Since joining the Atlantic Council in November 2011, Danya has focused on launching new initiatives on a coordinated U.S.-E.U. policy to promote democratization in the Arab world, U.S. military assistance to transitioning countries, and U.S. policy towards Yemen. Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, she worked at the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) as a program officer for the Middle East and North Africa division, where she implemented a three-year corporate governance project in Yemen, Bahrain, and Tunisia, and subsequently managed a portfolio of projects in Yemen. Before CIPE, she worked as a program officer at the International Republican Institute from 2003-2007. She helped launch several field offices and managed a variety of programs related to elections, political party strengthening, and civil society development in Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Qatar, Jordan, and West Bank/Gaza.

Morton H. Halperin

Morton H. Halperin is a senior advisor to the Open Society Foundations and the Open Society Policy Center. Halperin served in the Clinton, Nixon, and Johnson administrations, most recently as director of the policy planning staff at the Department of State (1998-2001). He taught at Harvard (1960-66) and as a visitor at other universities including Columbia, George Washington, and Yale. He has been affiliated with a number of other think tanks including the Center for American Progress, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Century Foundation, and the Brookings Institution. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, The Democracy Advantage, and Protecting Democracy.

Tom Garrett

Tom Garrett joined the International Republican Institute (IRI) in 1994 and currently serves as vice president for programs. Prior to this position, Garrett was IRI's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, 2005 to 2009. Garrett first served as IRI's resident program director for Ukraine. He later oversaw programs in Belarus and Moldova from IRI's base in Kyiv. Garrett left the Ukraine program in January 2000, to serve as IRI's resident advisor to the Ikh Hural, Mongolia's parliament. In addition to his Mongolia assignments, he conducted training for IRI programs in Cambodia and in Thailand for the Burmese democratic opposition in exile. In October 2000, Garrett moved to Jakarta as IRI's resident program director. Over the past eighteen years, he has also worked on election observation missions in Afghanistan, Albania, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, the Solomon Islands, and Ukraine, and, in 2011, was an election observer in Tunisia and Egypt.

Melinda Haring

Melinda Haring is an adjunct fellow at the American Security Project, and a specialist on democracy promotion and the former Soviet Union. She also manages a U.S.-Russia civil society program and oversees all communications and outreach efforts at Eurasia Foundation in Washington, D.C. Previously, from the National Democratic Institute, Haring managed a multimillion dollar political party assistance program in the Republic of Georgia and a civil society program in Azerbaijan. She has also worked at Freedom House and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. Haring developed her expertise on Eurasia by living and working in the region; she has lived in Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan and worked as a freelance writer in Ukraine. Her work has been featured in The Press-Enterprise and Transitions Online, and broadcast and published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. She is a graduate of Georgetown University's Democracy and Governance Program and holds a graduate certificate from the Walsh School of Foreign Service in Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies.

Al Hunt

Albert R. Hunt is a Bloomberg View columnist. The executive editor of Bloomberg News, he directs coverage of the Washington bureau, which includes more than 250 reporters and editors. Hunt hosts the weekly television show Political Capital with Al Hunt. In his four decades at the Wall Street Journal, he was a reporter, bureau chief and executive Washington editor and wrote the weekly column Politics & People. Hunt also directed the Journal's polls, was president of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund and a board member of the Ottaway community newspapers. He was a panelist on the CNN programs The Capital Gang and Novak, Hunt & Shields. Hunt is co-author of books on U.S. elections by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. His Bloomberg column also appears in the International Herald Tribune.

Charles Kesler

Charles Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College (CMC). He served as director of CMC's Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World from 1989 to 2008. He received his A.B., his A.M., and Ph.D. (in government, 1985) from Harvard University. He is editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. He is the editor of and a contributor to Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding, and has written extensively on American constitutionalism and American political thought. He is co-editor, with the late William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought. His articles on contemporary politics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, Policy Review, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other journals.

Zalmay Khalilzad

Zalmay Khalilzad served as U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations from 2007 to 2009. Prior to that, he served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq (2005-2007) and U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan (2003 to 2005). He also served as U.S. special presidential envoy to Afghanistan (2001 to 2003). Ambassador Khalilzad sits on the boards of the National Endowment for Democracy, America Abroad Media, the RAND Corporation's Middle East Studies Center, the American University of Iraq in Suleymania, and the American University of Afghanistan, and is a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He maintains close ties with high-level leadership throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, and is regularly called upon to provide strategic advice to numerous heads of state. He appears frequently on U.S. and foreign media outlets to share his foreign policy expertise. Ambassador Khalilzad earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and is now President of Gryphon Partners, a consulting and investment firm focused on the Middle East and Central Asia.

David Kramer

David J. Kramer is president of Freedom House, which he joined in October 2010. Prior to joining Freedom House, Kramer was a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF). Before joining GMF, Kramer served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor from March 2008 to January 2009. He also was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, responsible for Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus affairs as well as regional nonproliferation issues. Previously, he served as a professional staff member in the secretary of state's office of policy planning, and before that he served as senior advisor to the under secretary of state for global affairs.

Michael E. O'Hanlon

Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, homeland security, and American foreign policy. He is a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. O'Hanlon specializes in national security and defense policy and is senior author of the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Index projects. Before joining Brookings, O'Hanlon worked as a national security analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. His current research agenda includes military strategy and technology, Northeast Asia, U.S. Central Command, and defense budgets, among other defense/security issues. O'Hanlon's latest books are A Skeptic's Case for Nuclear Disarmament, The Science of War, Budgeting for Hard Power, and Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security (with Kurt Campbell).

Adam Przeworski

Adam Przeworski is the Carroll and Milton Professor of Politics at New York University. Previously he taught at the University of Chicago, where he was the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor, and held visiting appointments in India, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991, he is the recipient of the 1985 Socialist Review Book Award, the 1998 Gregory M. Luebbert Article Award, the 2001 Woodrow Wilson Prize, the 2010 Lawrence Longley Award, and the 2010 Johan Skytte Prize. He recently published Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government. His other books include Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America, which has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Bulgarian, Korean, Romanian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.

Jamila Raqib

Jamila Raqib serves as the executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution, where since 2002 she has worked closely with Gene Sharp, the foremost authority on strategic nonviolent struggle, assisting with new writing, and providing editorial support and research assistance. Her other responsibilities include liaising with opposition groups on the work and resources of the institution, and serving as a commentator on nonviolent action in the world for various media bodies, including the BBC, National Public Radio, Voice of America, and the New York Times, among others. She also provides background briefings for other international broadcasters, newspapers and periodicals. Recently, she authored the case study on the Tunisian revolution in the forthcoming Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle, by Gene Sharp. She also collaborated with Sharp to create a new curriculum for groups who wish to develop a grand strategy for their struggle to be able to do so self-reliantly. That publication is titled Self-Liberation and has been translated into Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Italian.

Tony Smith

Tony Smith is Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and senior fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has published single-authored books with Harvard, Cornell, Cambridge, and Princeton University Presses as well as with Norton and Routledge -- and over fifty articles in major American and European books and journals. His current interest is on the origins of American democracy promotion beginning in colonial times, when the European Enlightenment joined forces with anti-Anglican Protestant Christian movements in a unique fashion that would have consequences for America's thinking about world affairs beginning with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.

John D. Sullivan

John D. Sullivan is the executive director of the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE). As associate director of the Democracy Program, Sullivan helped to establish both CIPE and the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983. After serving as CIPE program director, he became executive director in 1991. Under his leadership CIPE developed a number of innovative approaches that link democratic development to market reforms: combating corruption, promoting corporate governance, building business associations, supporting the informal sector, and programs to assist women and youth entrepreneurs. He received a doctorate in political science from the University of Pittsburgh and is the author of numerous publications on the transition to democracy, corporate governance, and market-oriented democratic development. Sullivan is an adjunct faculty member at George Mason University Graduate School of Public Affairs, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance at the Yale School of Management.

Judy Woodruff

Broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff has covered politics and other news for more than three decades at CNN, NBC and PBS. After returning to NewsHour in 2007 as a senior correspondent, she now regularly co-anchors the newly redesigned PBS NewsHour. For twelve years, Woodruff served as anchor and senior correspondent for CNN, anchoring the weekday political program, Inside Politics. At PBS from 1983 to 1993, she was the chief Washington correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. From 1984- 1990, she also anchored PBS's award-winning weekly documentary series, Frontline with Judy Woodruff. In addition, she anchors a monthly program for Bloomberg Television, Conversations with Judy Woodruff. At NBC News, Woodruff served as White House correspondent from 1977 to 1982. For one year after that she served as NBC's Today Show chief Washington correspondent. Woodruff is a founding co-chair of the International Women's Media Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting and encouraging women in communication industries worldwide.

James Zogby

Dr. James J. Zogby is the author of Arab Voices and the founder and president of the Arab American Institute (AAI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization which serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community. Since 1985, Dr. Zogby and AAI have led Arab American efforts to secure political empowerment in the U.S. A co-founder and chairman of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign in the late 1970s, he later co-founded and served as the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In 1982, he co-founded Save Lebanon, Inc., a private nonprofit, humanitarian and nonsectarian relief organization. In 1994, with former U.S. Congressman Mel Levine, Zogby led a U.S. delegation to the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian agreement in Cairo. He has appeared as a regular guest on all the major network news programs and has an extensive media profile across the Arab world.