Anatol Lieven directs the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London. He also served as a member of the advisory committee of the South Asia Department of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and of the academic board of the Valdai discussion club in Russia. He holds a BA and PhD in history and political science from Cambridge University in England.

From 1985 to 1998, Lieven worked as a journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and covered the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and the southern Caucasus. From 2000 to 2007 he worked at think tanks in Washington DC.

Lieven is author of several books on Russia and its neighbors including The Baltic Revolutions: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence (Yale University Press, 1993), Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power? (Yale University Press, 1998), and Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry (US Institute of Peace, 1999). His book Pakistan: A Hard Country (Penguin UK, 2011) is on the official reading lists for US and British diplomats serving in that country. His latest book, Climate Change and the Nation State, was published in March 2020 and in an updated paperback edition in Fall 2021.