Janine Wedel

Janine R. Wedel is Professor of International Commerce and Policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Dr. Wedel writes about governance, corruption, development, and foreign policy through the unique lens of a social anthropologist. Her most recent book, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Nation, The National Interest, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, Salon, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Boston Globe. A four-time Fulbright Fellow, she has also won awards from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the German Marshall Fund, and the United States Institute of Peace. She has appeared on the BBC, CNN, PBS’s Frontline, and National Public Radio, and was an associate producer of three PBS documentaries.

As a Fellow at the New America Foundation, Dr. Wedel will examine the merging of state and private power. She is working on a book, Shadow Elite: The Privatization of Power, to be published by Basic Books, about the ways that today’s movers and shakers brandish power and influence, the new rules they are writing, and the implications for democracy. Her work will explore the extent to which the new rules take us beyond traditional questions of corruption and conflict of interest, and into an accountability-challenged era.

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