FPRI Events

Once again, ​China is ​experiencing a period of ​major transition. ​After three decades of dramatic economic ​growth and reforms​, China faces significant economic and political challenges at home while President Xi Jinping ​looks to refashion​ China’s place in the world. ​China is taking a more proactive approach to trade and related international economic affairs, a more vigorous approach to security matters, and a more focused engagement on international cultural and educational affairs. Across these diverse areas, China’s capacity—and desire—to influence events and outcomes have risen markedly. ​What have the results been to date, and what does China's future trajectory appear to be? To explore these questions, we are pleased to feature two FPRI Fellows, Jacques deLisle and Avery Goldstein.

Jacques deLisle is the Stephen A. Cozen Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His work focuses on China’s engagement with international law and the international order and legal reform in China.

Avery Goldstein is the David M. Knott Professor of Global Politics and International Relations, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on international relations, security studies, and Chinese politics.

This is Panel 2 of the FPRI Asia Program Conference on US Policy toward East Asia under the Trump Administration. This panel featured Michael R. Auslin (American Enterprise Institute), Shihoko Goto (Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars), Gilbert Rozman (FPRI and Princeton University), and was moderated by Jacques deLisle (FPRI and University of Pennsylvania).

This is Panel 1 of the FPRI Asia Program Conference on US Policy toward East Asia under the Trump Administration. This panel featured Jacques deLisle (FPRI and University of Pennsylvania), Scott Mulhauser (Georgetown University), and June Teufel Dreyer (FPRI and University of Miami), and was moderated by William Burke-White (Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania).

As of April 10, 2017, our 45th President, Donald J. Trump will have completed his first 100 days in office. What have these crucial days revealed about the Trump administration? What do they indicate for the next 1361 (or even the next 2822) days?

Joining us to discuss these questions and more is FPRI's Ronald J. Granieri, the host of FPRI's popular monthly program, Geopolitics with Granieri. Granieri is the Executive Director of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West, Editor of the Center’s E-publication The American Review of Books, Blogs, and Bull, and the Director of Research at the University of Pennsylvania's Lauder Institute.

Putin's government is usually associated with incompetence and corruption. Yet, the Kremlin has managed to deploy power so ruthlessly at home and abroad in part because of its ability to muster economic resources. Miller traces the economic policies that underwrite Russia's expansive foreign policy and Putin's continued control over the country's political system.

Joining us to discuss Putinomics is Chris Miller. Miller is a Fellow at FPRI’s Eurasia Program where he serves as the editor of the Baltic Bulletin. He is also the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University. His is the author of The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR.

How to understand a world where Russia threatens to break up the post-Cold War order in Europe, while China lays the groundwork for a new order in East Asia, and the entire Middle East is riven with conflict —this is the assignment we’ve given to one of the world’s great geopolitical thinkers, Jeremy Black, author of over 100 books on military and diplomatic history.

Slumping economies, political and social turmoil, environmental degradation, demographic crisis, and territorial disputes means that the stability is not to be taken for granted, or so argues AEI scholar Michael Auslin in his new book. This is a book for industry and investors, politicians and scholars, and anyone who wants to understand the future of Asia. A former professor of history at Yale, Auslin is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Forbes and a frequent commentator in U.S. and foreign media.

In this talk, FPRI's resident technology geek, Lawrence Husick, will examine the history of U.S. patent law, how it contributed to America's technological edge, and how the recent erosion of patent law places that that technological edge in jeopardy. He will conclude with a discussion of the implications for America's geopolitical position in the world.

Husick is Co-Chairman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center for the Study of Terrorism where he concentrates on the study of terrorist tactics and counterterrorism strategies, with a particular focus on technology leverage as a defining characteristic of the modern terrorist. He is also co-director of the FPRI Wachman Center’s Program on Teaching Innovation and a faculty member at the Whiting Graduate School of Engineering and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Biotechnology Program of the Johns Hopkins University.

General Durrani was commissioned in the Pakistan Army in 1961 and retired as a major general in 1998. He served as Pakistan's Ambassador to the US from 2006 to 2008, and then as National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of Pakistan from 2008 to 2009.

He continues to be active in working toward peace in South Asia as a member of a group of high-level Pakistanis and Indians. He is author of "India and Pakistan: The Cost of Conflict and the Benefits of Peace" (Johns Hopkins University, 2000).

Drawing on two-and-a-half years of closely watching Russia's online influence operations and monitoring some 7,000 social media accounts, Clint Watts tells the disturbing story of the Kremlin's army of trolls and their role in spreading disinformation to undermine trust in Western electoral systems. It was while investigating jihadis online that Watts came across the online activities of Russian trolls.

Watts is a Robert A. Fox Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East as well as a Senior Fellow with its Program on National Security. He serves as the President of Miburo Solutions, Inc. Watts’ research focuses on analyzing transnational threat groups operating in local environments on a global scale. Before starting Miburo Solutions, he served as a U.S. Army infantry officer, a FBI Special Agent on a Joint Terrorism Task Force, and as the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC).