Robert Lieber and Michael Mosser

Tuesday, February 9, 2016  |  12:15pm  |  SRH 3.122

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Over the past few years, Russia has been much more assertive with its foreign policy. The annexation of Crimea, Russian bombing in Syria, and military saber rattling all indicate Russia’s willingness to aggressively pursue its interests abroad. There is one man at the center of it all: Vladimir Putin. What are his goals? What is his vision for Russia? What do these mean for Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world? These are the questions that will guide the discussion.

Dr. Robert Lieber is a professor of government and international affairs at Georgetown University, where he has previously served as Chair of the Government Department and Interim Chair of Psychology.  He is author or editor of sixteen books on international relations and U.S. foreign policy, and has been an advisor to presidential campaigns, to the State Department, and to the drafters of U.S. National Intelligence Estimates.  He received his undergraduate education at the University of Wisconsin and earned his Ph.D. at Harvard.  He held fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He has taught at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of California, Davis.  He has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Foundation nationale des sciences politiques in Paris, the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and Fudan University in Shanghai.  He latest book, “Retreat and its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Future of World Order,” will be published this spring by Cambridge University Press.  

Dr. Michael W. Mosser is currently serving as a lecturer with a joint appointment in the Department of Government, the Center for European Studies, and the International Relations and Global Governance (IRG) program at the University of Texas at Austin. From August 2009 to May 2012, he was a visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX. From January to June 2009, he served as Associate Director of the European Union Center of Excellence and a Fellow of the Robert S. Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin.  From 2006 to 2009 he was an assistant professor at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he taught international relations, security studies, and comparative foreign policy of Western Europe.

He has published articles in the fields of military art and science and military sociology, and is presently working on a research project re-conceptualizing military doctrine as a social construction. His latest article, “Embracing “embedded security”: the OSCE’s understated but significant role in the European security architecture” is published in European Security as of July 2015.