Revisiting U.S.-Georgia Relations after the August War

As an Open Society Fellow, Cooley researched the impact of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on regional integration in Central Asia. His particular interest was whether the SCO sidelined Western actors by providing an alternative source of legitimacy to member states. His book on US-Russia-China competition in Central Asia, based on research he conducted as a fellow, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Cooley is Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College in New York City. He is the author of three previous books, including Logics of Hierarchy: The Organization of Empires, States and Military Occupations, (Cornell, 2005), which looks at how Soviet administrative legacies shaped the formation of Central Asian states; and Base Politics: Democratic Change and the US Military Abroad, (Cornell, 2008), which examines the political impact of U.S. military bases in overseas host countries, including Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Cooley serves on the Board of Advisors of the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Foundations. He has contributed policy-related articles and opinion pieces to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and The Washington Quarterly. Cooley earned both his MA and PhD from Columbia University.

Lincoln Mitchell is an associate at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.  Before joining Columbia's faculty, he was a practitioner of political development and continues to work in that field now. 

In addition to serving as chief of party for the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Georgia from 2002-2004, Mitchell has worked on political development issues in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.  He also worked for years as a political consultant in New York City advising and managing domestic political campaigns. 

Mitchell's current research includes work on US-Georgia relations, democratic transitions in the former Soviet Union, and the role of democracy promotion in American foreign policy.  His book Uncertain Democracy: US Foreign Policy and Georgia's Rose Revolution was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2008. He has also written articles on these topics in The National Interest, Orbis, The Moscow Times, the Washington Quarterly, The American Interest, Survival, the Central Asian Survey, The New York Daily News and Current History as well as for numerous online publications including the online sections of The Washington Post and the New York Times and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Transitions Online.  

Mitchell  is also a frequent blogger on The Huffington Post where he writes primarily about domestic politics in the US, and on The Faster Times where he writes about US Foreign Policy and baseball.  He is currently working on a book about the color revolutions in the former Soviet Union.

Mitchell earned his PhD from Columbia University's department of political science in 1996.

Fiona Hill is director of the Center on the United States and Europe, and senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at The Brookings Institution. She is a frequent commentator on Russian and Eurasian affairs, and has researched and published extensively on issues related to Russia, relations among the states of the former Soviet Union, the Caucasus region, Central Asia, ethno-political conflicts in Eurasia, and energy and strategic issues.

Her book with Brookings Senior Fellow Clifford Gaddy, The Siberian Curse. How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, was published by Brookings Press in December 2003; her monograph Energy Empire: Oil, Gas and Russia's Revival was published in London by the Foreign Policy Centre in 2004.

Hill holds an MA in Russian and modern history from St. Andrews University in Scotland, an AM in Soviet studies, and PhD in history from Harvard University, where she was a Frank Knox Fellow. She has also pursued studies at the Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow. Hill is president of the St. Andrews University American Foundation, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Anthony Richter is the associate director of the Open Society Institute, and director of the OSI Central Eurasia Project and Middle East & North Africa Initiative.

Richter is chairman of the governing board of the Revenue Watch Institute and serves on the board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the World Policy Journal, and other publications. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He received a BA, with high honors, from Wesleyan University and an MA in Slavic languages and literatures from Columbia University. He speaks Russian, French, and Persian.