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Evan A. Feigenbaum

Adjunct Senior Fellow for East, Central, and South Asia

Expertise

China and India as emerging global powers; economic integration in East, Central, and South Asia; new global and Asian regional architecture; U.S.-Asian relations; geopolitics in Asia; Central Asia; Southeast Asia; Japan; North and South Korea.

Programs

Asia Program

Bio

Evan Feigenbaum is adjunct senior fellow for East, Central, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also the first executive director of the Paulson Institute, an independent center, located at the University of Chicago, established by former Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson.

Initially an academic with a PhD in Chinese politics, his work has since spanned government service, business, and think tanks, and all three major regions of Asia. From 2001 to 2009, he served at the State Department as deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia (2007-09), deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia (2006-07), member of the policy planning staff with principal responsibility for East Asia and the Pacific (2001-06), and as an adviser on China to Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, with whom he worked closely in the development of the U.S.-China senior dialogue.

During the intensive final phase of the U.S.-India civil nuclear initiative from July to October 2008, he co-chaired the coordinating team charged with moving the initiative through the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and then to Congress, where it became the U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Nonproliferation Enhancement Act. He negotiated agreements with the governments of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and also has extensive policy experience with North and South Korea and Japan. He received three individual and two group superior honor awards from the State Department.

Following government service, Dr. Feigenbaum was head of the Asia practice group and a director at Eurasia Group, a global political risk consulting firm working principally for financial institutions and corporate clients. Before government service, he worked at Harvard University (1997-2001) as lecturer on government in the faculty of arts and sciences, and as executive director of the Asia-Pacific security initiative and program chair of the Chinese security studies program in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He taught at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School (1994-95) as lecturer of national security affairs and was a consultant on China to the RAND Corporation (1993-94).

His publications include: Managing Instability on China's Periphery (CFR, 2011, coauthor), The United States in the New Asia (CFR, 2009, coauthor), China's Techno-Warriors: National Security and Strategic Competition from the Nuclear to the Information Age (Stanford University Press, 2003; Chinese edition published as Zhonggong Keji Xianqu, Taipei, 2006), and Change in Taiwan and Potential Adversity in the Strait (RAND, 1995). His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, International Herald-Tribune, Survival, Washington Quarterly, China Quarterly, and Russia in Global Affairs. He is a former columnist for the Business Standard, India's leading financial newspaper, and contributes regularly to CFR's blog, "Asia Unbound."

A native of New York City, he received his AB in history from the University of Michigan and his AM and PhD in political science from Stanford University. He has received awards, prizes, and competitive fellowships, including Olin and Belfer fellowships at Harvard University (1997-99), and spent three years as a fellow of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation (1994-97). He studied overseas in Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Taipei. He is proficient in Chinese and French and has studied Japanese, Korean, and Russian. He and his wife, Kimberly Foerster, have two children, Alexander and Eliza.