The Bridging the Gap Team

Naazneen Barma
Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School

Brent Durbin
Assistant Professor, Government Department, Smith College

James M. Goldgeier
Dean, School of International Service, American University

Bruce W. Jentleson
Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Duke University

Ely Ratner
Associate Political Scientist, RAND Corporation

Steven Weber
Professor of Political Science and I-School, University of California, Berkeley

The Fellows

Eric Lorber
PhD Candidate, Political Science, Duke University

Jay Purcell
PhD Candidate, Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

Rachel Whitlark
PhD Candidate, Political Science, George Washington University

Naazneen H. Barma is Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. Her research and teaching focus on the political economy of development, natural resource governance, and international interventions in post-conflict states. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the political economy of transitional governance approaches to peacebuilding. Naazneen received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA and MA from Stanford University. She has worked extensively for the World Bank, with a regional specialisation in East Asia and the Pacific. She has published academic articles on governance, innovation, and institution-building in the developing world and has co-authored policy-oriented pieces on the political economic implications of the evolving international system. She is co-editor of The Political Economy Reader: Markets as Institutions and co-author of Rents to Riches? The Political Economy of Natural Resource-Led Development.

Brent Durbin is assistant professor at Smith College, where he teaches courses in U.S. foreign policy, strategic intelligence, military conflict and culture, and international relations. His research interests span these topics, with a particular focus on the organizational dynamics of national security bureaucracies. He is currently working on a book manuscript exploring the politics of U.S. intelligence reform. Brent earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and also holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and an M.P.P. from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has held research fellowships at GWU’s Elliott School of International Affairs, Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the University of California's Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), and Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the Smith faculty, Brent taught in the public policy program at Stanford University. He is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has served as press secretary for U.S. Senator Patty Murray, and as an advisor and senior staff member on several campaigns for U.S. Congress.

James Goldgeier is Dean of the School of International Service at American University. Prior to that, he served as professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. Jim taught previously at Cornell University, and has held appointments at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, the State Department, the National Security Council, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Library of Congress, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Hoover Institution, and the Transatlantic Academy. From 2001-2005, he directed GW’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. Jim’s most recent book is America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (co-authored with Derek Chollet).

Bruce W. Jentleson is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University, where he previously served as Director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. His policy experience includes having served as a Senior Advisor to the U.S. State Department Policy Planning Director from 2009 to 2011. His most recent books are American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century, a leading university text (W.W. Norton, 5th edition 2013) and The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas, co-authored with Steven Weber (Harvard University Press, 2010). Other recent work includes “Global Governance in a Copernican World,” Global Governance (Summer 2012); co-author of Strategic Adaptation: Towards a New U.S. Strategy in the Middle East (Center for a New American Security, June 2012); “Beware the Duck Test,” The Washington Quarterly (Summer 2011); and “Bridging the Beltway-Ivory Tower Gap,” with Ely Ratner, International Studies Review (March 2011). Bruce currently serves on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) Working Group, co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. His Ph.D. is from Cornell University.

Ely Ratner is currently serving on the China Desk at the State Department as the lead political officer covering China’s external relations in Asia. His appointment is an International Affairs Fellowship sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. At the conclusion of his fellowship, Ely will be joining the Center for a New American Security as an Asia-Pacific Security Fellow. Prior to joining the State Department, Ely was an Associate Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he performed research and long-range analysis on the rise of China, the People’s Liberation Army, and regional security in Asia. His commentary and research have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Democracy, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, and Chinese Journal of International Politics. Ely previously worked as a Professional Staff Member on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and his B.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Steven Weber works at the intersection of technology markets, intellectual property regimes, and international politics. Steven is Professor of Political Science and Professor of The Information School at the University of California, Berkeley. His research, teaching, and advisory work for the last decade have focused on the political economy of knowledge intensive industries, with special attention to health care, information technology, software, and global political economy issues relating to security and competitiveness. He is also a frequent contributor to scholarly and public debates on international relations and US foreign policy. Steven’s 2004 book, The Success of Open Source, is the leading study of the political economy of the open source software community. Other relevant publications include Cooperation and Discord in US – Soviet Arms Control; Globalization and the European Political Economy; coauthored with Ely Ratner and Naaz Barma, “How Globalization Went Bad,” Foreign Policy (2007) and “A World Without the West,” The National Interest (Summer 2007); coauthored with Bruce W. Jentleson “America's Hard Sell,” Foreign Policy (2008) The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas (2010), which proposes terms of global leadership for an emerging era of ideological competition; and, most recently, co-edited with Nils Gilman and Jesse Goldhammer, Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century (2011).

Eric Lorber works broadly in the area of coercive diplomacy, law, and security studies. He has advised the Department of Defense on issues relating to export controls, emerging technologies, stability operations, and U.S. sanctions policy. Eric is a JD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Duke University. He is an adjunct staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses and has worked at the RAND Corporation. He has served on the Iran Sanctions desk in the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Intelligence. He has also advised Fortune 500 companies on U.S. sanctions law – as well as establishing sanctions compliance programs – for Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, L.L.P. Eric is a member of the Project on Strategic Stability Evaluation at Georgia Tech and the Monterrey Institute and was previously a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Rachel Whitlark is a sixth year PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at the George Washington University and for 2012-2013 a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her interests lie in international security and her research focuses on weapons proliferation, U.S. grand strategy, and threat perception. Her dissertation project investigates the conditions under which a state considers and will use preventive military force as a counter-proliferation strategy against nuclear weapons programs. She is a member of the Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS, a regular participant with the Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at IGCC, and a fellow with the Bridging the Gap Project’s New Era Conference on Foreign Policy. She holds a master's degree from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree also from George Washington. Prior to beginning her PhD, Rachel worked in a variety of capacities in the Los Angeles office of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Rachel is originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and is a life-long Philadelphia Eagles fan.