March 2017

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs UT’s Asia Policy Program, a joint initiative of the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. She is also concurrently a Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Chestnut Greitens’ work focuses on national security, East Asia, and authoritarian politics and foreign policy. Her first book, Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (Cambridge, 2016) received multiple academic awards. Her second book, on authoritarianism, security, and diaspora politics, focuses on North Korea (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in East Asia, forthcoming 2023). She is currently finishing her third book manuscript, which examines how internal security concerns shape Chinese grand strategy.

Chestnut Greitens’ work has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes in English, Chinese, and Korean, and in major media outlets. She regularly testifies to Congress and briefs policymakers on issues related to authoritarianism and security in the Indo-Pacific. She received a Ph.D. from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a Bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

Paul Stronski is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Russia and Eurasia Program, where his research focuses on the relationship between Russia and neighboring countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

Until January 2015, Stronski served as a senior analyst for Russian domestic politics in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He was Director for Russia and Central Asia on the U.S. National Security Council Staff from 2012 to 2014, where he supported the president, the national security advisor, and other senior U.S. officials on the development and coordination of policy toward Russia. Before that, he worked as a State Department analyst on Russia from 2011 to 2012, and on Armenia and Azerbaijan from 2007 to 2010. A former career U.S. foreign service officer, Stronski served in Hong Kong from 2005 to 2007.

Stronski has taught history and post-Soviet affairs at Stanford, George Mason, and George Washington universities. Prior to his government service, he worked on a USAID-sponsored technical assistance project for the healthcare sector in Central Asia.

Stronski is the author of Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City, 1930-1966 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), which won the 2011 Central Eurasian Studies Society Book Award for History and the Humanities. Since the mid-1990s, he has undertaken extensive research and work experience in Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Armenia.