Dr. Fiona Hill, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow -- Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe
Reviewing her new book, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century, NPR characterizes it as “Part memoir, part history tome, and policy prescription”.
In it she draws on her perspectives gained up in County Durham after the mine closures to study the parallel histories of deindustrialization in the UK, Russia and the US. She examines why it is difficult in many areas to get ahead, why opportunities are fleeting and how that is affecting each country’s social and political fabric.
In our December meeting, we’ll have a conversation about the implications of these socio-economic challenges on national leadership and foreign relations: how they may be fueling the rise of populism and the emergence of autocratic leaders; how it might challenge our national security strategy; whether there are any signs of this trend abating; and what we might do to limit it.
Dr. Fiona Hill is the Robert Bosch senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. She recently served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. From 2006 to 2009, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at The National Intelligence Council. She is co-author with Clifford Gaddy of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).
Prior to joining Brookings, Hill was director of strategic planning at The Eurasia Foundation in Washington, D.C. From 1991 to 1999, she held a number of positions directing technical assistance and research projects at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, including associate director of the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project, director of the Project on Ethnic Conflict in the Former Soviet Union, and coordinator of the Trilateral Study on Japanese-Russian-U.S. Relations.
Hill has researched and published extensively on issues related to Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, regional conflicts, energy, and strategic issues.
Hill holds a master’s in Soviet studies and a doctorate in history from Harvard University where she was a Frank Knox Fellow. She also holds a master’s in Russian and modern history from St. Andrews University in Scotland and has pursued studies at Moscow’s Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages. Hill is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.