Speaker Biographies
December 6, 2005
Gerard Alexander is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Virginia. His research has primarily been on democratic transitions and democratic consolidation. He is author of the book Sources of Democratic Consolidation published by Cornell University Press. He has written about the role of electoral laws and other institutions in several scholarly articles and academic papers, including in Comparative Political Studies and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. He has also written articles on democratization in other venues such as the National Interest, The Weekly Standard, and the new issue of Policy Review (December 2005-January 2006). He will be on sabbatical leave this coming year as a National Research Initiative fellow at the AEI.
Jeffrey Anderson is the Graf Goltz Professor and Director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. Professor Anderson previously spent 12 years on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at Brown University. From 1988-1990, he taught at Emory University. Professor Anderson has also been a fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, and was a visiting professor at Georgetown in 2000-2001. In 2001-2002, while on leave from Brown, he served as Director of Studies for the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, DC. Professor Anderson's publication record includes two single-authored books, German Unification and the Union of Europe: The Domestic Politics of Integration Policy and The Territorial Imperative: Pluralism, Corporatism and Economic Crisis , and an edited volume entitled Regional Integration and Democracy: Expanding on the European Experience. He has also published numerous chapters and journal articles in the field of European comparative politics and comparative political economy. His current research examines the "Europeanization" of the polity and political economy regimes of the member states in the European Union.
Michael S. Greve is the John G. Searle Scholar at AEI, where he directs the Federalism Project and the Liability Project. His research and writing cover American federalism and its legal, political, and economic dimensions. Mr. Greve cofounded and, from 1989 to February 2000, directed the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm that served as counsel in many precedent-setting constitutional cases, including United States v. Morrison and Rosenberger v. University of Virginia. He has written widely on constitutional and administrative law, federalism, environmental policy, and civil rights.
Donald L. Horowitz is the James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University. Professor Horowitz is the author of six books: The Courts and Social Policy, which won the Louis Brownlow Award of the National Academy of Public Administration; The Jurocracy, a book about government lawyers; Coup Theories and Officers’ Motives: Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective; A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society, which won the Ralph Bunche Prize of the American Political Science Association; and The Deadly Ethnic Riot. In 2001, he was Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and in 2001-02, he was a Carnegie Scholar. Professor Horowitz is currently writing a book about constitutional design, particularly for divided societies, a subject on which he has advised in a number of countries. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, he is also Vice-President (and President-nominee) of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.
Lindsay Lloyd has served as the Regional Program Director for Europe for the International Republican Institute since April 2002. He oversees programs in Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey and a 15-country regional program. Prior to his appointment as Regional Program Director, Mr. Lloyd worked for IRI in Bratislava, Slovakia. From 1999 to 2002, Mr. Lloyd served as co-director of IRI's Regional Program for Central and Eastern Europe. Since joining IRI, he has organized and delivered numerous seminars, conferences, and lectures across Slovakia, and done similar training in Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovenia, and Turkey. He conducted assessment missions for IRI to Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovenia, and worked on get-out the-vote campaigns for the 1997 Slovak referendum and the parliamentary election in Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Lloyd has observed 10 elections and overseen polling and political consultation projects in Romania and Bulgaria. Prior to joining IRI, Lloyd spent twelve years working in American politics. He worked for several members of the U.S. House of Representatives including members of the U.S. House Republican leadership.
Andrew Reynolds is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research and teaching focus on democratization, constitutional design, and electoral politics. He has worked for the United Nations, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), the UK Department for International Development, the US State Department, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the International Foundation for Election Systems. He has also served as a consultant on issues of electoral and constitutional design for Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Fiji, Guyana, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Liberia, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Yemen, and Zimbabwe--most recently in Kabul reporting on election preparations in Afghanistan and in Rangoon, Burma. His published books include The Architecture of Democracy: Constitutional Design, Conflict Management, and Democracy (Oxford, 2002) and Electoral Systems and Democratization in Southern Africa (Oxford, 1999). He is currently working on a book titled First Do No Harm: Applying the Lessons of Medicine to the Art of Constitutional Design. His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in many publications, including World Politics, Electoral Studies, Political Science Quarterly, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune.
Andrew Shearer is the minister and counsellor for political affairs at the Australian Embassy in Washington D.C. Before his appointment to Washington in September 2003, Mr. Shearer was Senior Adviser on strategic policy to Senator the Hon. Robert Hill, Minister for Defence from 2002 until September, 2003. Mr. Shearer joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in 2000. He served as Director of the Refugees, Immigration, and Transnational Crime Section during 2000 and 2001, and was appointed Director of the Japan Section later in 2001. Before joining DFAT, Mr. Shearer worked in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) for six years. He was the Director of theAsia Section in the International Division from 1997 to1998 and later served in the East Timor Policy Group between 1999 and 2000. Mr. Shearer was Executive Assistant to the former Secretary of PM&C in 1994. He was a Current Intelligence Officer in the Office of National Assessments during 1991 and 1992, and from 1989 to 1990 he was a Research Officer in the Department of Defence.
Judy Van Rest has served as Executive Vice President for the International Republican Institute since August, 2004. From April 14, 2003 to July 1, 2004, she served as Senior Advisor for Governance for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad. She also served as CPA's Director of the Office of Democratic Initiatives. Ms. Van Rest was appointed to the Peace Corps as Associate Director for Management and Chief Information Officer in September 2001 and was responsible for formulating policies and implementing operation plans for both domestic and overseas Peace Corps missions. She became Regional Director for the Europe, Mediterranean, and Asia Region in 2002. Prior to the Peace Corps, Ms. Van Rest served as Regional Director for the Commonwealth of Independent States programs for IRI, one of the core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy. She participated in observer missions for national and local elections in Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Mongolia and conducted political party seminars in Russia, Kazakhstan, and the Kyrgyz Republic. Previously, Ms. Van Rest has served as Chief of Staff for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and has held management positions at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Smithsonian Institution and the Republican National Committee.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Between 2002 and 2004, Mr. Rubin worked as a staff advisor for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in which capacity he was seconded to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. He has previously worked as a lecturer in history at Yale University, Hebrew University, and at three different universities in northern Iraq. Mr. Rubin is the author (with Patrick Clawson) of Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave, November 2005), and of Into the Shadows: Radical Vigilantes in Khatami's Iran (Palgrave, 2001).
Meyrav Wurmser is the director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Middle East Policy. She is the former Executive Director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Through her work at MEMRI, Ms. Wurmser helped to educate policymakers about the Palestinian Authority two-track approach to “negotiating peace” with Israel: calling for peace in the English press and with Western policymakers while inciting hatred and violence through official Arab language media. Ms. Wurmser is a frequent guest on radio and television, including BBC, Fox News, CNN, PBS and CNBC. She has written numerous books and monographs on Israel, the Arab world, and Zionism, including Building Free Societies in Iraq and Afghanistan (Hudson Institute, 2004) and The Schools of Ba'athism--a Study of Syrian Schoolbooks (MEMRI, 2000). She has taught political science at the Johns Hopkins University and the United States Naval Academy, and has published articles in such publications as The Weekly Standard, the Middle East Quarterly, the Washington Times, the Middle East Journal and Middle East Insight.
