Franz H. Michael (1907-92) directed the Institute from 1969 to 1972. Michael was a noted expert on nineteenth century China and Sino-Soviet relations. He frequently testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and worked on behalf of the State Department and Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Michael was born on March 10, 1907 in Freiburg, Germany, to a Jewish mother. During his early career, he served in the German diplomatic service, but left when Hitler came to power. From 1933 to1938, he worked in China as a professor at the National Chekiang University in Hangchow. In 1938, he came to the US and joined the GW faculty in 1964, serving as associate director of the Institute from 1964 to 1969. His books included The Origin of Manchu Rule in China (1942) and The Far East in the Modern World (1955).

In his capacity as associate director, Michael recruited Carl Linden to GW in order to develop the Institute’s expertise on domestic Soviet politics. In analyzing the events taking place under mercurial Communist Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Linden’s work made clear that Khrushchev was not unchallengeable. In a prescient Problems of Communism article published a year before he fell, Linden highlighted the on-going leadership struggle and Khrushchev’s precarious position, stirring a good deal of controversy over the question of his power. Linden’s book, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership (1966), traced the struggle that ended with his downfall. It laid out the case for a “conflict model” of Soviet leadership politics and became a classic of “Kremlinology.”

Read more on Franz H. Michael here.

Gaston Sigur (1924-1995) served as director from 1972 until 1989. In addition to being a Distinguished Professor of East Asian Studies, Sigur served as Director of Asian Affairs on the National Security Council, Special Assistant to the President for Asian Affairs, and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific during the Reagan administration. Sigur’s contribution was crucial in U.S. efforts to win trade concessions from Japan and encourage democracy in South Korea, according to his obituary in the New York Times. He also accompanied President George H. W. Bush to China in 1989. After serving in the Army in post-war occupied Japan, he worked as a research scholar at Sophia University in Tokyo from 1959 to 1961. Although his training was in the foreign relations of Japan’s Tokugawa era, most of his career focused on contemporary Asian affairs. With extensive ties in the conservative community, he brought considerable funding to the university from a range of foundations.

Under Sigur, the Institute had a rare connection with the USSR – close ties with Soviet scholars who specialized in China, Japan, and Korea, alternating conferences in Moscow and Washington. As a result, when Gorbachev came to power, GW scholars could see firsthand that things were changing rapidly in the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, Gorbachev had talked about a balance of interests rather than a balance of forces, suggesting that East-West relations were no longer a zero sum game and opening new opportunities for collaboration.

Find out more about Gaston Sigur at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies.

With the end of the Cold War and Sino-Soviet relations no longer being a key issue, the Center for Asian Studies spun off in 1991 and it was named in Sigur’s honor. At that point, James Millar (1936-2008) stewarded IERES into formation and shifted the focus more toward Russia and the post-Soviet successor states. Millar served as IERES director from  1989 to 2001, taking over the Institute just as the Berlin Wall was falling and the Soviet Union was in its death throes. He was a canny bureaucratic fighter who protected the Institute’s domain. He blocked an effort to turn the Institute into a center, which would have reduced its academic status. When he left, IERES “was a well-funded, well-known center of study with a suite of offices, a conference room, computers for each faculty member, work space for student research assistants, host to internationally renowned visiting scholars, a partner with the Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project, and the home of a new journal, Problems of Post-Communism,” according to Hope Harrison (IERES Director 2005-9).

As director, Millar encouraged a collegial atmosphere designed to facilitate inter-disciplinary studies. Linden and long-time colleague Suzanne Stephenson started these gatherings in the 1970s and this popular tradition continues today, offering faculty and staff a chance to interact on an informal basis. In 2007, he established the Millar Family Fund to support IERES and launched the James Millar Lecture Series on Russian/Soviet economics.

An economist, Millar studied centrally planned economies. He led an influential panel created by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to review the CIA’s estimates of Soviet economic growth and defense expenditures from 1970 to 1991. The panel concluded that the CIA greatly overestimated Soviet defense expenditures and that the agency’s work could have been improved with more input from outside sources, leading to changes in the way that the CIA collected information. His books included such classics as The Soviet Rural Community (University of Illinois Press, 1971), and Politics, Work and Daily Life in the USSR (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Additionally, he published The Social Legacy of Communism (1994), edited with Sharon L. Wolchik, The Soviet Economic Experiment (1990), and The ABCs of Soviet Socialism (1981). He edited the four-volume Encyclopedia of Russian History (2003). He was editor of the Slavic Review from 1975 to 1980 and Problems of Post-Communism. Additionally, he served as president (2000), vice-president (1999), and treasurer (2004-8) of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS, now ASEEES –Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies). The AAASS bestowed its Distinguished Contributions to Slavic Studies Award, its highest honor, on Millar in 2006.

After the drama surrounding the end of the Berlin Wall and then the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, interest in Eurasia flagged as attention turned to the Middle East after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and to China, as it became an economic powerhouse. Nevertheless, even against this backdrop, Europe and Eurasia remained significant. The EU and NATO continued to play major roles as they expanded eastward across the continent and the rise of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian model became a new cause for concern in Russia.

Even as the global political situation quickly changed, IERES continued to play a leading role in shaping thinking about the region. Jim Goldgeier served as IERES director from 2001-2005. Reflecting larger trends in the academic and policy world, his main interests focused on contemporary international relations and issues of transatlantic security, with early publications examining leadership style in Soviet foreign policy and the US decision to enlarge NATO. Like the directors before him, Jim put into practice the idea that scholarship should have real world application. Over the course of his career, he worked at the State Department, the National Security Council staff, and several think tanks in Washington, including the Council on Foreign Relations. IERES served as an effective launch pad for Jim, who on August 1, 2011, became dean of American University’s School of International Service.

During Jim’s tenure, the Institute continued to build on its strengths by starting the GW Cold War group, together with GW history professors James G. Hershberg, Hope M. Harrison and Gregg Brazinsky (GWCW). This group seeks to build a community of faculty, scholars, and graduate students dedicated to encouraging a multilingual, multidisciplinary, and multinational exploration of the Cold War experience and its implications for understanding current policy issues. The group has hosted conferences, workshops, and seminars with faculty and students, including a dissertation chapter presentation series.

Students particularly benefited from the GWCW. The group holds an annual graduate student conference on the Cold War, alternating between GW, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. These conferences have been open to PhD students from around the world.

With support from the Henry Luce Foundation, IERES developed programs on the Cold War in Asia that led to a major international conference in Budapest, co-sponsored with a number of partners, including the Cold War International History Project and the National Security Archive. Additionally, with a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, IERES worked with the Cold War International History Project on creating www.coldwarfiles.org, a web site designed to help high school teachers convey a richer understanding of this conflict to their students.

While developing its expertise on the Cold War, the Institute also focused on the expanding European Union, which was playing an increasing role in shaping European economic and foreign policies. In 2001, the Institute joined with colleagues at Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, George Mason and American Universities to create the American Consortium on European Union Studies (ACES), a center on European Union Studies funded by the European Commission. In addition to its strength in Russian and Eurasian studies, IERES today continues to cooperate with the European Union Research Center, a joint collaboration between the Elliott School for International Affairs and the Business School. Professor of International Business Scheherazade Rehman is the head of the Center.

Given the rising influence of the EU and the growing authoritarianism in Russia, Ukraine became a key focal point in Europe. With elections approaching at the end of 2004, IERES partnered with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to present a major workshop on Civil Society in Ukraine. This event turned out to be prophetic because it was held about six months before the Orange Revolution, when large numbers of Ukrainian citizens came out into the streets to reject efforts to falsify the 2004 presidential elections. The conference included many of the major figures in Ukrainian civil society who went on to play important roles in the quickly changing Ukrainian political environment. Numerous IERES scholars have written about the Orange Revolution, including Sharon Wolchik and Henry Hale.

In order to give students a better preparation to pursue professional careers dealing with Europe and Eurasia, IERES merged its two previously existing MA programs (the program in Russian and East European Studies and the program in European Studies) into one MA program in European and Eurasian Studies. The European Union is dealing with a variety of issues, including economic integration, immigration, and terrorism, while Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union are addressing the legacies of Communism in both the economic and political spheres. Since these two regions are increasingly interacting with each other, the retooled IERES MA program gives students a comprehensive overview of the current interaction between Europe and Eurasia.

Historian Hope M. Harrison was IERES director from 2005 to 2009 and strengthened the Institute’s commitment to understanding the past and its relevance to current world affairs. Hope’s research illuminates the history of the Berlin Wall and its subsequent significance. Hope served as Director of European and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council from 2000-2001. Her responsibilities there included ties with Central Asia and the Caucasus, making her the White House representative to peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Upon taking over the Institute, Hope faced resource challenges; for example, under Dean Harry Harding, the Institute staff was cut back from two administrative people to one, so Hope inherited a smaller staff and less general funding from the Elliott School

As director, one of Hope’s key accomplishments was procuring funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Program on Conducting Archival Research (POCAR)—including yearly support for a pre-doctoral fellow, a one-day workshop, and a 5-day Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research (SICAR). In 2006, she won a 2-year grant from Mellon to launch the project. In 2008, Mellon committed to a 3-year $330,000 grant. This year she won another 3-year extension for $285,000 in collaboration with Associate Professor of History and International Affairs Gregg Brazinsky, who succeeded Hope as POCAR director this year

Additionally, Hope created the History, Memory, and Politics of the Past Project. The central focus of this project is to explore how various countries have approached and/or are now dealing with difficult aspects of their past. The project has a global scope and brought together faculty from IERES, the Elliott School, and the broader GW community (such as the National Security Archive, the History Department, the Political Science Department, and the Department of German and Slavic Languages and Literatures) and students. Over the years, the project has sponsored conferences, workshops, and brown-bag lunches.

Finally, Hope continued running the GWCW. One of the key accomplishments during Hope’s tenure was to co-host a major conference with the State Department in September 2006 to coincide with its release of a Foreign Relations of the United States volume on U.S.-Chinese relations (FRUS, XVII). These collections represent the official documentary historical record of major US foreign policy decisions that have been declassified and edited for publication. IERES released a CD-ROM of Chinese documents in English translation to coincide with the FRUS volume.

In 2008, under the auspices of GWCW, and at the invitation of the Cold War History Center at East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai, Hope took seven GW history Ph.D. students for a graduate student conference on the Cold War with Chinese Ph.D. students at ECNU. Additionally, Hope started the IERES Fellows program for GW undergrads and graduate students whereby they are part of the IERES community, receive office space, and make a research presentation. 

Henry Hale took over as director of IERES in 2009. His writings focus on issues of ethnicity, democracy, and international integration, and he is the author of books on separatism and political parties in the post-Soviet region. His best-known article is “Divided We Stand” (World Politics, 2004), which won the APSA’s Qualitative Methods Section’s Alexander George Award.

Henry has built on previous efforts to make IERES one of the country’s top research centers in its field. Central to Henry’s goal is a continuation of IERES’s traditional effort to bridge the gap between scholarship and policy-making and to take advantage of the Institute’s location in downtown Washington to make innovative and timely research available to the individuals designing and implementing American policy toward Europe and Eurasia.

A major development in this effort was bringing the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) to IERES. PONARS Eurasia is the premiere network of international scholars working on transnational and comparative issues facing the post-Soviet space. With substantial backing from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, PONARS Eurasia regularly brings to IERES many of the academic world’s most exciting rising stars for policy conferences and book presentations, and also brought to GW on a permanent basis Cory Welt, a prominent expert on Eurasian Security and the South Caucasus, to run PONARS’ day-to-day operations as well as teach in the EES MA Program and conduct research.

Henry further expanded IERES by finding ways to bring in top scholars who conduct cutting-edge research and actively participate in the media while also increasing the capacity of the Institute. 

Henry has also sought to build on the funding that IERES receives from the William and Helen Petrach Program on Ukraine, established under the directorship of James Millar, to make IERES a leading center of Ukrainian studies. This program has sponsored a variety of guest scholars, speakers, and research efforts. In the fall, it will launch a major effort to understand what promotes and hinders reform in Ukraine.

During the seven years that Peter Rollberg directed both IERES and the MA Program in European and Eurasian Studies, strengthening the synergy between these two entities was a high priority. Not only were many EES graduate students hired as research assistants by institute members – IERES research professors began to teach on a regular basis in the EES program. Another priority was to ensure a productive balance between the Russian/Eurasian wing and the European wing of the institute. While PONARS Eurasia and the Central Asia Program developed and consolidated their excellent reputation as hubs of international scholarly exchange, new members such as Kimberly Morgan, Hilary Silver, and Erwan Lagadec gave vital impulses to the development of our expertise on Western Europe by organizing impressive events on themes such as NATO/transatlantic security and migration. A particular highlight was the visit of French President Macron to GWU on April 25, 2018, which was initiated by Prof. Lagadec. Another priority was to raise the institute’s cultural profile, with photo exhibitions, film screenings, and concerts becoming an essential part of our daily life.

The institute activities grew exponentially, so that by 2015, the annual number of IERES events exceeded 100 and reached 119 in 2016, thus generating about one third of all Elliott School events (25 of these were organized by the Central Asia Program, 22 by PONARS Eurasia, and the remainder by IERES administration and various institute members). In 2017, IERES for the first time was included in the prestigious McGann Think Tank Ranking, reaching #6 worldwide among university-affiliated regional studies institutes, ahead of all other comparable institutes in the United States. Among other accomplishments, this ranking was based on institute members’ impressive grant-related activities. Thus, in 2018-2019 alone, IERES members won or continued to manage 19 grants totaling $6,721,543. A particular priority for our institute staff has been international outreach – indeed, they took the lead in turning IERES into a lively, warm, and hospitable place for numerous junior and senior scholars from around the world. For example, in 2018-2019, the institute hosted 34 visiting scholars and fellows from the United States, Norway, Greece, Germany, Russia, Brazil, France, and the five Central Asian republics.

Since 2019, IERES has been led by Prof. Marlene Laruelle. During her directorship, the Institute restructured its activities into six programs. PONARS Eurasia and the Central Asia Program were  joined by the Petrach Program on Ukraine, the Arctic Program, the Transatlantic Program, and the Illiberalism Studies Program. The Petrach Program on Ukraine is the home to the Institute’s research on Ukraine, as well as the Ukrainian Studies Fellowship. Under the leadership of Prof. Bob Orttung, the Arctic Program consists of multiple research initiatives dedicated to the study of the Arctic and its changing climatic, economic, and social conditions. The Transatlantic Program, directed by Prof. Erwan Lagadec, studies the evolution of the transatlantic relationship, the political and societal changes of European states, and engages with the practicionners’ community on both sides of the ocean to develop both academic and policy solutions. 

Prof. Laruelle also launched the Illiberalism Studies Program that aims at studying the rise of illiberal movements in Europe, Eurasia, and the US, and at promoting research ranging from the study of the transnational connections of the far right to great power competition and the challenges raised by China and Russia to the liberal world order.

The Central Asia Program has taken the lead in developing its outreach in multiple languages. It launched three analytical websites in English (Voices on Central Asia), Russian (Central Asia Analytical Network) and Uzbek (UZ Analytics), with Aitolkyn Kourmanova as their main editor, as well as online research almanacs in Kazakh and Kyrgyz. The book series on Contemporary Central Asia at Lexington/Rowman & Littlefield has reached its 20^th volume with the publication by Prof. Peter Rollberg of The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan (1925-1991): An Uneasy Legacy, while the peer-reviewed quarterly Central Asian Affairs will be entering the main database such as Scopus and Web of Science in 2022.

PONARS Eurasia has also developed its outreach efforts by launching a podcast on contemporary Russia, led by Maria Lipman and giving the floor mostly to Russian scholars, and a PONARS Eurasia Online Academy  designed to provide succedent overviews of policy-relevant research and contemporary scholarship on Russia and Eurasia.

Thanks to the continuous effort of IERES faculty and staff over six decades, the Institute has been ranked the #1 University-Affiliated Regional Studies Center in the U.S. in both the 2019 and 2020 Go To Global Think Tank Index Report.