Carol R. Saivetz

csaivetz@mit.edu

CAROL R. SAIVETZ has recently been appointed a Research Affiliate in the Security Studies Program, MIT. For the last two years she has been a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Center for International Studies. She is also a Research Associate at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and an Associate at Harvard's Ukrainian Institute. From 1995-2005, she was the Executive Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and from 1992-2006, she was a Lecturer in Government, at Harvard.

She holds a B.A. from Brandeis University, an M.I.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University in Political Science. In addition, she holds a Certificate from what is now the Harriman Institute at Columbia. She has consulted for the US Government, presenting on Russian-Iranian relations to the Department of State and on the legacy of Putin's foreign policy to the CIA.

She has written widely on Soviet and now Russian policy in the Middle East and the other Soviet successor states. Among the titles of her books are "The Soviet Union and the Gulf in the 1980s," "Soviet-Third World Relations," and "In Search of Pluralism: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics."

She has participated in numerous academic conference, including most recently at an MIT conference on Persian Gulf Energy Security and the Harvard Ukrainian Institute on the Central Asian role in the Ukrainian-Russian Gas Crisis.

Her most recent works include: "Russia's Iran Dilemma," Russian Analytical Digest, September 2006; "Making the Best of a Weak Hand: an Assessment of Current Trends in Russian Foreign Policy," Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 22, No. 2 (April-June, 2006); "Russia, Iraq and Iran: Business, Politics or Both" in Wenger, Perovic, and Orttung, Russian Business Power, (NY: Routledge), 2006; "Russia: An Energy Superpower?" for the CIS Audit Series; and, "Tangled Pipelines: Turkey's Role in Energy Export Plans," Turkish Studies, Vol 10, No. 1 (March, 2009). She is currently working on a book on Putin's foreign policy.