Authors@Google: Ian Bremmer

Authors@Google welcomed Ian Bremmer to the NY office Friday May 4th 2007. Ian Bremmer is president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk advisory and consulting firm. He is also a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and a columnist for the Financial Times.

Ian Bremmer received his PhD in political science from Stanford University in 1994, specializing in nation- and state-building in the former Soviet Union. Bremmer went on to the faculty of the Hoover Institution where, at 25, he became the Institution's youngest ever National Fellow. He has held research and faculty positions at Columbia University, the EastWest Institute, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the World Policy Institute, where he has served as Senior Fellow since 1997. His research focuses on states in transition, global political risk, and US foreign policy.

"With this timely book, political risk consultant Bremmer aims to "describe the political and economic forces that revitalize some states and push others toward collapse." His simple premise is that if one were to graph a nation's stability as a function of its openness, the result would be a "J curve," suggesting that as nations become more open, they become less stable until they eventually surpass their initial levels of stability. In other words, a closed society like Cuba is relatively stable; a more open society like Saudi Arabia is less so; and an extremely open society like the United States is extremely stable. Bremmer expertly distills decades—sometimes centuries—of history as he analyzes 10 countries at different positions on the J curve. North Korea is perhaps the most disturbing example of the left side of the curve, where a closed authoritarian regime produces effective stability; on the right of the curve sit stable countries like Turkey, Israel and India. This leads Bremmer to conclude that political isolation and sanctions often work against their intended resultsand that globalization is the key to opening closed authoritarian states. Bremmer persuasively illustrates his core thesis without eliding the complexities of global or national politics. (Sept.) " - Publishers Weekly . Copyright © Reed Business Information

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