Join moderator: Ambassador G. Philip Hughes, Senior Vice President, Council of American Ambassadors, speaker: Matthew Rojansky, President & CEO, US Russia Foundation, and speaker: Sebastien Peyrouse, Director, Central Asia Project & Research Professor, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, George Washington University as they open the 2024 Fall conference panel 1, discussing political and diplomatic relations' in the 2024 Fall Conference, 'Near-Abroad: Russia's Neighbors or Victims?'

Matthew Rojansky serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of The U.S. Russia Foundation. Prior to USRF, Rojansky served from 2013 as Director of the Kennan Institute, the premier U.S. center for advanced research on Russia and Eurasia and the oldest and largest regional program within the Congressionally chartered Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Rojansky is among the most widely recognized and cited U.S. experts on Russia, and has published works on the history and practice of U.S.-Russia relations, bilateral exchanges, and rule of law. Rojansky also serves as the U.S. Executive Secretary for the Dartmouth Conference, a track-two U.S.-Russian conflict resolution initiative begun in 1960, and has lectured at colleges and universities throughout the United States, Russia and Europe. He is a counselor to the Cooperative Security Initiative, the Aspen Institute Congressional Program, and the Euro-Atlantic Security Leaders Group.

Previously, Rojansky was Deputy Director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Executive Director of the Partnership for a Secure America. He has also served as an Embassy Policy Specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, a Visiting Scholar in the Research Division at the NATO Defense College, and a Clerk to Judge Charles E. Erdmann on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. He received his B.A. in history from Harvard College, and his J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Sebastien Peyrouse, PhD, is the director of the Central Asia Program and a research professor at in the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (George Washington University), and a researcher at EUCAM (Europe-Central Asia Monitoring), Brussels.

He worked five years in Central Asia, at the French Institute for Central Asian Studies in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1998-2000, 2002-2005), and was Research Fellow at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C. (October 2006-June 2007), and at the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute (SAIS, Johns Hopkins University (2007-2010).

His main areas of expertise are political systems in Central Asia, economic and social issues, Islam and religious minorities, and Central Asia’s geopolitical positioning toward China, India and South Asia. He has edited with Kirill Nourzhanov Soft Power in Central Asia: Politics of Influence and Seduction?, (Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books, 2021), China and India in Central Asia. A new “Great Game”? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and has published a monograph, Turkmenistan. Strategies of Power, Dilemmas of Development (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, November 2011), and, with Marlene Laruelle, The ‘Chinese Question’ in Central Asia. Domestic Order, Social Changes, and the Chinese Factor (London, New York: Hurst, Columbia University Press, December 2011) and Globalizing Central Asia: Geopolitics and the Challenges of Economic Development (Armonk: ME Sharpe, 2012). His articles have appeared in Europe Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, China Perspectives, Religion, State & Society, Journal of Church and State.