Dr. Stefan Meister has been the head of the German Council on Foreign Relations’ Program on International Order and Democracy since August 2021. From 2019 until then, he worked as director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s South Caucasus Office.
From 2017 to 2019, Dr. Meister was head of the Robert Bosch Center for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at DGAP, where he had previously headed its program for Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. Before that, he was a senior policy fellow in the Wider Europe Team at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in Berlin and London. In the 2015/16 term, Dr. Meister was a visiting fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, DC, where he wrote on Russian disinformation and propaganda. He has served as an election observer for the OSCE in post-Soviet countries several times and worked on conflict transformation and institution building in post-Soviet countries.
Dr. Meister is co-author of Geopolitics and Security: A New Strategy for the South Caucasus (KAS/DGAP/GIP, 2018), The Russia File (Brookings, 2018), Eastern Voices (Center for Transatlantic Relations/DGAP, 2017), and The Eastern Question (Brookings, 2016).
He studied international relations and East European history in Jena, Leipzig, and Nizhni Novgorod and holds a Ph.D. from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena with a thesis on the transformation of Russian higher education and research system.
Dr. Angela Stent (1982 ACG Young Leader) is Senior Adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University where she is also Professor Emerita of Government and Foreign Service. She is also a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairs its Hewett Forum on Post-Soviet Affairs. From 2004-06 she served as the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State.
Dr. Stent’s publications include: From Embargo to Ostpolitik: The Political Economy of West German-Soviet Relations, 1955-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981); Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, The Soviet Collapse and The New Europe (Princeton University Press, 1999); The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), for which she won the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Douglas Dillon prize for the best book on the practice of American Diplomacy. Her most recent book is Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest (Twelve Books, 2019) for which she won the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy’s prize for the best book on U.S-Russian Relations.
She was a member of the senior advisory panel for NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe for Admiral James Stavridis and General Philip Breedlove. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a contributing editor to Survival and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cold War Studies, World Policy Journal, Internationale Politik, and Mirovaia Ekonomika i Mezhdunarodnie Otnosheniie. She has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council for Russia and Central Asia. She was a trustee of the Eurasia Foundation. Dr. Stent received her bachelor’s from Cambridge University, her Master’s of Science with distinction from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and her master’s and doctorate from Harvard University.
