Speaker biographies

Mauro De Lorenzo is a resident fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at AEI, where he studies entrepreneurship in developing countries as well as Chinese investment and political influence outside the Pacific region. In 2005, he worked with Afghan construction companies in Kabul, and prior to that was a research associate at both the American University in Cairo and the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, focusing on refugee policy and the wars in Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. In 2002, he researched and was associate producer of a BBC documentary film about U.S. food aid to Africa and the misdiagnosis of famine.

Kimberly Marten is a professor and the chair of the political science department at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. An expert on international security issues, Marten was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Arms Control, a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and a Hitachi/Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in Japan, as well as a visiting professor at the Japanese National Defense Academy. Her research has been funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Social Science Research Council/MacArthur Foundation, and the government of Canada, among others. She has written three books: Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past (2004), Weapons, Culture, and Self-Interest: Soviet Defense Managers in the New Russia (1997), and Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation (1993), which received the Marshall Shulman Prize. Her articles have appeared in International Security, Armed Forces and Society, Washington Quarterly, and Post-Soviet Affairs. She has written numerous chapters in edited volumes, opinion pieces in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune, and policy memos for the Program on New Approaches to Russian Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She has completed two open-source contract projects for the director of net assessment at the Pentagon.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar in foreign policy studies at AEI, where he studies Arab democracy, Kurdish society, and domestic politics in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Prior to joining AEI, he served as a political advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad from 2003 to 2004. Previously, he was a staff advisor for Iran and Iraq in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during 2002–2004. He is currently the editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

Rory Stewart currently lives in Kabul, where he is the chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. A former member of the British Diplomatic Service, he worked in the British embassy in Indonesia from 1997 to 1999 and then, in the wake of the Kosovo campaign, as the British representative in Montenegro. In 2000 he took two years off and began walking from Turkey to Bangladesh. He covered 6,000 miles on foot alone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, a journey described in his book, The Places in Between. In 2003 he became the coalition deputy governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar, two provinces in the Marsh Arab region of southern Iraq. In 2006 he published his second book, The Prince of Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq. He has written for a range of publications, including The New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, the Sunday Times, London’s Guardian, the Financial Times, and Granta.

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