On Thursday 1 February 2007 the IISS will host a panel discussion on "America and Iraq: Assessing the 'Surge'" from 1.30pm. The panellists will be: Dr Dana Allin, Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Affairs; Editor of Survival, IISS; Dr Toby Dodge, Consulting Senior Fellow for the Middle East, IISS; and Mr Yahia Said, Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Global Governance.
Dana H. Allin is editor of Survival, and Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Affairs at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), He is also Professorial Lecturer in American Foreign Policy and European Studies at the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). A graduate of Yale University, he worked as a Europe-based financial journalist before earning an MA and PhD from Johns Hopkins-SAIS. He was visiting assistant professor in European Studies and American Foreign Policy at the SAIS centers in Bologna, Italy and Washington, D.C., a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow, and Deputy Director of both the Aspen Institute Berlin and the International Commission on the Balkans (a joint project of Aspen Berlin and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). His publications include NATO’s Balkan Interventions, Adelphi Paper 347 (2002) and Cold War Illusions: America, Europe and Soviet Power, 1969-1989 (1994 and 1998).
Toby Dodge is Consulting Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is author of Iraq’s Future; the Aftermath of Regime Change, (London: Routledge for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2005), and Inventing Iraq: the Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). He is co-editor of Adelphi Paper 354 - Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change (January 2003) and Globalisation and the Middle East, Islam, Economics, Culture and Politics (2002). He is a is a Reader in International Politics, Department of Politics, Queen Mary, University of London. He completed a PhD on the transformation of international system in the aftermath of the First World War and the creation of the Iraqi state at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He also taught international relations and Middle Eastern politics in the Department of Political Studies at SOAS for four years.
Yahia Said is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance. His experience combines academic research with private sector work and activism. Prior to joining LSE he worked as a corporate finance consultant with Ernest & Young in Russia. He also worked as a project coordinator with the Helsinki Citizens' Assembly in Prague. Yahia Said specialises in issues of economic transition and security in post-communist societies. His publications include ‘Iraq in the Shadow of Civil War,’ Survival (Winter 2005-06), 'The New Anti-Capitalist Movement: Money and Global Civil Society.', co-authored with Meghnad Desai, in Global Civil Society 2001 and Regime Change in Iraq, co-authored with Mary Kaldor (CsGG, 2003). His research interests are: Central Europe; corporate finance; Eastern Europe; economic transition; former Soviet Union; international finance; Russia; transition; transition economies; transitional economies; post-conflict Iraq and Israel/Palestine; and post-totalitarian states.
Discussion Meetings take place at Arundel House, 13-15 Arundel Street, WC2R 3DX. This meeting will take place in the Fifth Floor meeting room.
Please notify Kathleen James at
james@iiss.org or tel +44 (0)20 7395 9109 if you would like to attend.
