Anders Åslund joined the Institute for International Economics in 2006. He has served previously as the director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace since 2003 and as codirector of the Carnegie Moscow Center's project on Economies of the Post-Soviet States. He joined the Carnegie Endowment as a senior associate in October 1994. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. His work examines the transformation of formerly socialist economies to market-based economies. While the central areas of his studies are Russia and Ukraine, he also focuses on the broader implications of economic transition.

Åslund has served as an economic adviser to the governments of Russia and Ukraine and to President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics. He has worked as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and an honorary professor of the Kyrgyz National University. He is co-chairman of the Economics Education and Research Consortium and chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), Warsaw.

He is the author of Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge University Press, 2001), How Russia Became a Market Economy (Brookings, 1995), Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform, 2d ed. (Cornell University Press, 1991), and Private Enterprise in Eastern Europe: The Non-Agricultural Private Sector in Poland and the GDR, 1945-83 (Macmillan, 1985) and editor or coeditor of several books, including with CDDRL Director, Michael McFaul, Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006).

This event is co-sponsored with the Center on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

A former career member of the Senior Foreign Service, Barbara Bodine served as US Ambassador to Yemen from 1997-2001. Ambassador Bodine spent her 30-year diplomatic career primarily in the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula, including tours as Deputy Principal Officer in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War and Deputy Chief of Mission in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion and occupation in 1990. In 2003 Ambassador Bodine served as coordinator for post-conflict reconstruction for Baghdad and the central governorates of Iraq.

In addition to a number of assignments in the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Ms. Bodine was the Associate Coordinator for Operations and subsequently acting overall Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the Department of State, Dean of the School of Professional Studies at the Foreign Service Institute and Director of East African Affairs.

Ambassador Bodine is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Secretary's Award for Valor, the Secretary's Career Achievement Award and the Department's Distinguished Service Award.

Dr. Brumberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He received his BA in French and Political Science from Indiana University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. From 1991 to 1993 he was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University, and a Visiting Fellow in the Middle East Program in the Jimmy Carter Center.

He lived and studied in Egypt for three years, and has also conducted field research in Iran, Indonesia and Kuwait. The author of many articles on political and social change in the Middle East and wider Islamic World, his Reinventing Khomeini: The Struggle for Reform in Iran was published in April 2001 by The University of Chicago Press.

A member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Democracy and the Advisory Board of the International Forum on Democratic Studies, Dr. Brumberg is also Chairman of the non-profit Foundation on Democratization and Political Change in the Middle East. In 1998-1999 he was a Randolph Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, where he pursued a study of power sharing in the Middle East and South East Asia.

Drawing from this research, Dr. Brumberg is now writing a comparative study of successful and failed power sharing experiments in Algeria, Kuwait and Indonesia.