Contested Territories: Geopolitics, Economics, and Security
2023 ALLIES Civil-Military Relations Conference
November 10-11, 2023
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Dr. Jaw-Ling Joanne Chang is an Adjunct Research Fellow at The Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. She is the former Deputy Secretary General of Taiwan’s National Security Council and the former Deputy Representative in the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in the United States. She has held many teaching positions in Taiwan and in the United States. She is the author of the articles “Cross-Strait Tensions and the Risk of War: The View from Taipei”, “Trump Administration and the Promotion of U.S.-Taiwan Relations”, “Why China’s Taiwan Approach Is Counterproductive: Moving cross-strait relations forward in 2017 will require a new strategy”, and “United States – China Normalization: An evaluation of foreign policy decision making”. She is also the author of United States-Taiwan Relations: Twenty Years After the Taiwan Relations Act.
11:00am
Panel 1: Taiwan-China Relations
Michael J. Glennon is Professor of Constitutional and International Law at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Prior to going into teaching, he was Legal Counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1977-1980). He has since been a Fulbright Distinguished Professor of International and Constitutional Law, Vytautus Magnus University School of Law, Kaunas, Lithuania (1998); a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. (2001-2002); Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Scholar at the United States Military Academy, West Point (2005); Director of Studies at the Hague Academy of International Law (2006); and professeur invité at the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) from 2006 to 2012. Professor Glennon has served as a consultant to various congressional committees, the U.S. State Department, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. He has testified before the International Court of Justice and congressional committees.
Ret. Amb. John T Hennessey-Niland (EPIIC ’86, Tufts ’86, Fletcher ’87) is a Professor of the Practice at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and the former U.S. Ambassador to Palau. He is one of the most experienced “Pacific hands” in the Department of State. He has served previously at the White House as the National Security Council, as a UN War Crimes Investigator in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda and at a number of posts in Europe and in the Pacific, where he has served in Fiji, Australia, as well as in Hawaii where he was the “POLAD”, the foreign policy advisor, to the Commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific (MARFORPAC). John was recognized by State as the POLAD of the Year while with the Marines. He was entrusted by the White House to be the first U.S. Ambassador to visit Taiwan since 1979 and is an advocate for expanding U.S. engagement with Taipei. He is also a leader on climate. His efforts – working closely with Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Secretary Kerry – helped ensure the annual Our Ocean Conference (OOC) was held in 2022 for the first time in the Pacific and in an island nation. He has a distinguished record and is a proven foreign policy and national security leader with 35 years of diplomatic experience as a member of the U.S. Foreign Service. He is a FIFA qualified coach and played collegiate soccer at Tufts University.
Dr. Fu-Kuo Liu is currently a Research Associate at the Center for International Relations at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is also the Chairman of the Research and Planning Committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hull in the UK. Prior to his current positions, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs, a Visiting Scholar at Japan’s Aoyama Gakuin University in the School of International Politics and Economics, and adjunct Associate Professor in the Institute of International Politics at National Chung Hsing University, a staff member of the Executive Yuan “Foreign Fishery Cooperation and Fishing Boat Seizure Processing Team,” and a member of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Committee of the Executive Yuan.
2:00pm
Panel 2: The Russia-Ukraine War
Ambassador Vesko Garčević is Professor of the Practice of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, and he served as the Ambassador of Montenegro in Brussels (NATO) and Vienna (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe – OSCE and other International Organizations). He was a Montenegrin Ambassador to Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. During his diplomatic career he held important positions at the challenging political time of the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and democratic transition of Montenegro. After Montenegro regained independence in 2006, he served as the first Montenegrin Ambassador to Austria and the OSCE. Ambassador Garčević’s areas of expertise include multilateral diplomacy, European security, enlargement process in Europe: the EU enlargement and NATO open door policy, democratic transition in Eastern and South-East Europe, the Western Balkans, and diplomacy of small states in global affairs.
Dr. Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of comparative politics in the Department of Political Science at Tufts University and Director of Tufts’ International Relations program. Her research and teaching focuses on the post-Soviet region, especially Ukraine and Russia, and issues such as nation building and identity politics, citizenship policies, memory politics, church-state relations, and the democratization process in the post-Soviet region. She is a co-author (with Maria Popova) of a forthcoming book on the root causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity, 2023). Her earlier book, Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge, 2011) which examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region, won the American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture. Oxana Shevel serves as Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS). She’s a country expert on Ukraine for Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), a member of PONARS Eurasia scholarly networks, and a board member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTShA). She’s also an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Outside of academia, she has served as a consultant for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and for the US Department of State and has provided expert testimony on applications for asylum in US courts.
Dr. Alexandra Vacroux (EPIIC ’86, Tufts ’86) is executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Her scholarly work addresses Russian and Eurasian policy issues, including the war in Ukraine. As director of graduate studies for the Davis Center’s MA program in regional studies, she has mentored dozens of Harvard’s best and brightest students and regional experts. She also directs the center’s Scholars Without Borders program. Alexandra lived in Moscow from 1992 to 2004. While there she was a consultant for the Russian Privatization Agency, partner and head of sales at the Brunswick Warburg investment bank, and an active member of the board of United Way Moscow. While completing her dissertation on corruption in Russian pharmaceutical markets, she was affiliated with the Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR), a Russian think tank associated with the New Economic School. Prior to joining the Davis Center in 2010, she lived in Washington, DC, where she was a scholar at the Kennan Institute, part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Saturday, November 11
2:30pm
Panel 3: Nagorno Karabakh
Dr. Audrey L. Altstadt is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has a PhD from the University of Chicago and specializes in Soviet history, with special attention to the national minorities. She is the author of numerous articles and three books: Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Columbia University Press, 2017); The Politics of Culture in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920-1940 (Routledge 2016); and The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule (Hoover Institution Press 1992.
Altstadt received an honorary doctorate from Khazar University in Baku, Azerbaijan. She has been a recipient of various grants including from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Harvard’s Davis Russian Research Center, the US Institute of Peace. She has been a consultant for Freedom House, Oxford Analytica (UK), Radio Liberty, US Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service, the US State Department/ NFATC, the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe and other agencies.
Alex Avaneszadeh is the Project Manager for the Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he recently received his PhD. Prior to that, he was a Legal Intern in the Office of the Representative on International Legal Matters in the Government of the Republic of Armenia. Alex is an Analyst for Foreign Brief, focusing on political events in the post-Soviet space. With a background in international law and diplomacy, his expertise lies in the geopolitical, economic and energy security dynamics of the South Caucasus. He is the author of “Armenia and the Failed Experiment of Eurocentrism” and “What Does Azerbaijan’s Blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh Mean?”
Anna Ohanyan is the Richard B. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Stonehill College. She is also a Nonresident Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace/Russia and Eurasia Program, and a two-time Fulbright Scholar to South Caucasus. She has authored and (co)-authored five books, which include Russia Abroad: Driving Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia and Beyond, an edited volume published by Georgetown University Press in 2018, and Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management, published by Stanford University Press in 2015. Her latest book is titled The Neighborhood Effect: The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia, Stanford University Press in 2022. Her articles appeared in Nationalities Papers, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, International Studies Review, Peace and Change, Conflict Resolution Quarterly, and Global Governance, among other journals. She has also contributed to The Washington Quarterly, Washington Post, National Interest, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, and Wilson Quarterly. Prof. Ohanyan served as a doctoral fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (2002-2004), and her research has been supported by IREX, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the German Marshall Fund, the U.S. State Department, and Eurasia Foundation among others. She has consulted for numerous organizations such as the United Nations Foundation, the World Bank, the National Intelligence Council Project, the U.S. Department of State, the Carter Center, and USAID. Her work has taken her across the globe, from Northern Ireland to the Balkans, Russia, and the South Caucasus.
