War in Ukraine: An Expert Panel Discussion

On Wednesday, March 2, 2022, The University of Texas at Austin’s Clements Center for National Security, Strauss Center for International Security and Law, Intelligence Studies Project, Asia Policy Program, LBJ School of Public Affairs, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies hosted an expert panel discussion on “War in Ukraine”. The event was free and open to the public. For event photographs, click HERE. Listen to the full audio recording HERE.

BIOGRAPHIES

Bobby Chesney is the Director of the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, holds the James Baker Chair, and serves as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law. In 2009, Chesney served in the Justice Department in connection with the Detention Policy Task Force created by Executive Order 13493. He also previously served the Intelligence Community as an associate member of the Intelligence Science Board and as a member of the Advanced Technology Board. In addition to his current positions at the University of Texas, he is a member of the American Law Institute, and a senior editor for the Journal of National Security Law & Policy, and a former non-resident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution. Chesney is a co-founder and contributor to www.lawfareblog.com, the leading source for analysis, commentary, and news relating to law and national security. In addition to his blogging at Lawfare, those interested in national security law should consider following Professor Chesney on Twitter (@bobbychesney) as well as subscribing to the National Security Law Podcast (which he co-hosts with his colleague Steve Vladeck). Chesney’s scholarship focuses on U.S. national security policies and institutions, encompassing both domestic and international law issues.

Zoltán Fehér is an America in the World Consortium Predoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, a PhD Candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute for American Studies at the University of Public Service – Hungary. Previously, he worked as a professional diplomat for his home country Hungary for 12 years, serving as foreign policy analyst at the Hungarian embassy in Washington, D.C., and later as Hungary’s Deputy Ambassador and Acting Ambassador in Turkey. He has published extensively about U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union in the Cold War and about NATO’s transformation and enlargement in Central and Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War. His dissertation project focuses on U.S. strategy vis-à-vis Communist China in the early post-Cold War period.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and founding director of the Asia Policy Program. Her work focuses on East Asia, authoritarian politics, and American national security policy. She is currently working on two main research projects: one on China’s internal security policies and their implications for China in the world, and another on authoritarian diasporas, particularly focused on North Korea. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an adjunct fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. From 2015 to 2020, Greitens was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and co-director of the University’s Institute for Korean Studies. Her work on China and North Korea has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes in English, Chinese, and Korean, and in major media outlets. She has also previously testified to Congress on security issues in the Indo-Pacific. Her first book, Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (Cambridge, 2016) received the 2017 Best Book Award from both the International Studies Association and the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association. In 2017-18, Greitens served as the First Lady of Missouri, where she helped lead the state’s trade mission to China and South Korea, and successfully advocated for major legislative and administrative reforms to Missouri’s policies on foster care, adoption, and child abuse prevention. She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor’s from Stanford University.

William Inboden is Executive Director and William Powers, Jr. Chair at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. He also serves as Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, Distinguished Scholar at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and Editor-in-Chief of the Texas National Security Review. Previously he served as Senior Director for Strategic Planning on the NSC at the White House. Inboden also worked at the Department of State as a Member of the Policy Planning Staff and a Special Advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom, and as a Congressional staff member in both the US House and Senate. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and member of the CIA Historical Advisory Panel and State Department Historical Advisory Council. Inboden’s forthcoming book, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan in the White House and the World, will be released in November, 2022 and is an in-depth account of how Reagan’s foreign policy won the Cold War and laid the foundations for the 21st century.

Stephen Slick is the Director of the Intelligence Studies Project, a joint partnership between the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. He retired in 2014 after 28 years as a member of CIA’s clandestine service. Between 2005 and 2009, Slick served as a special assistant to the president and the Senior Director for Intelligence Programs and Reform on the staff of the National Security Council. He was previously the Director for Intelligence Programs at the NSC. While serving at the White House, Slick participated in efforts to restructure and reform the intelligence community informed by recommendations of the commissions charged with investigating the 9/11 attacks and the flawed pre-war analysis of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs. These efforts included a series of executive orders on U.S. intelligence issued in August 2004, key provisions in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the administration’s responses to recommendations by the “WMD Commission,” as well as significant amendments to Executive Order 12333 that were approved by President George W. Bush in 2008.

Alexandra Sukalo is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security and will be joining the Naval Postgraduate School in the fall as an Assistant Professor of Modern Russian History and Security Policy. She earned her PhD from Stanford University in Russian and East European History. She has spent considerable time living and conducting research in Eastern Europe. She has worked at U.S. Embassy Moscow in the Regional Security Office and prior to beginning her PhD, she served as an Eurasian Military Analyst with the Department of Defense. Her current book project explores the creation of the Soviet Union’s security organs in the Union’s western republics, including Ukraine, under Lenin and Stalin.

Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University’s Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Suri is the author and editor of nine books on contemporary politics and foreign policy. Suri writes for major newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Foreign Affairs, Fortune, The American Prospect, and Wired—as well as for various online sites and blogs. He is a popular public lecturer, and appears frequently on radio and television. Suri teaches courses on strategy and decision-making, leadership, globalization, international relations and modern history. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, and he also teaches and serves as academic director for the Executive Master in Public Leadership program at the LBJ School. His research and teaching have received numerous prizes. In 2007, Smithsonian magazine named him one of America’s “Top Young Innovators” in the arts and sciences.