Midcoast Forum on Foreign Relations

Steven Koltai

Monday, December 19, 2016

Topic: Peace Through Entrepreneurship

Steven Koltai created and ran the Global Entrepreneurship Program for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a central element of President Obama’s strategy for changing the relationship between the U.S. and Muslim communities around the world. He left the State Department to continue the work of global entrepreneurship ecosystem building via Koltai & Company. Steven is currently a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution.  He is the author, most recently, of Peace Through Entrepreneurship: Investing in a Startup Culture for Security and Development [Brookings Institute Press, 2016].

Steven has over 30 years of business experience with several successful startups under his belt, including SES, the world’s largest commercial TV satellite system, and Event411, an online event management business which he founded, grew to over 250 employees, and sold in 2002. He has also served as Senior

Vice President for Strategy and Corporate Development at Warner Bros., as a strategic planning consultant at McKinsey & Co., and as an investment banker at Salomon Bros. Steven is an active angel investor and mentor to entrepreneurs around the world.

Soner Çağaptay

Monday, November 14, 2016

Topic: Turkish foreign policy on ISIS, Kurds and the Syrian civil war

Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. He has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism, publishing in scholarly journals and major international print media, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, Habertürk and Jane’s Defense Weekly. He is a regular columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey’s oldest and most influential English-language paper, and a contributor to CNN’s Global Public Square blog. He appears regularly on Fox News, CNN, NPR, Voice of America, al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN-Turk and al-Hurra.

A historian by training, Dr. Cagaptay wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale University (2003) on Turkish nationalism. Dr. Cagaptay has taught courses at Yale and Princeton on the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. His spring 2003 course on modern Turkish history was the first offered by Yale in three decades. From 2006-2007, he was Ertegun Professor at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. He also served as a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Dr. Cagaptay is the recipient of numerous honors, grants, and chairs, among them the Smith-Richardson, Mellon, Rice, and Leylan fellowships, as well as the Ertegun chair at Princeton. He also served as chair of the Turkey Advanced Area Studies Program at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. In 2012, Dr.Cagaptay was named an American Turkish Society Young Society Leader.

He is the author of the book Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk? (2006) as well as the forthcoming book Turkey Rising: The 21st Century’s First Muslim Power (2014).

The opinions expressed in this website are not necessarily those of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, its Board of Trustees, or its Board of Advisors.

Josh Landis

Friday, October 28, 2016

Topic: ISIS, Ethnic Cleansing, and Nation-Building in the Middle East

Joshua Landis is Director of the Center for Middle East Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma’s College of international Studies.

He writes “Syria Comment,” a daily newsletter on Syrian politics that attracts over 100,000 readers a month. Dr. Landis travels frequently to Washington DC to consult with government agencies and speak at think tanks. Most recently he has spoken at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, Brookings Institute, USIP, Middle East Institute, and Council on Foreign Relations.

He was educated at Swarthmore (BA), Harvard (MA), and Princeton (PhD). He has lived over 14 years in the Middle East and speaks Arabic and French fluently. He has lived four years in Syria, and spent most summers in Damascus until the revolution began.

He is a frequent analyst on TV and radio. (See: Landis in the News) Most recently he has appeared on PBS News Hour,

Paulo Sotero

Monday, September 12, 2016

Topic: The Turmoil in Brazil

Paulo Sotero is the director of the Brazil Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. An award winning journalist, from 1989 to 2006 he was the Washington correspondent for Estado de S.Paulo, a leading Brazilian daily newspaper. Sotero began his career at Veja in the late 1960s and worked for the magazine in São Paulo, Recife, Brasília, and Paris, until he was named its correspondent in Portugal after the democratic revolution of April 25, 1974. Sotero has been in Washington, D.C., since 1980, where he has been a correspondent for Istoé weekly magazine and the financial newspaper Gazeta Mecantil. He is a frequent guest commentator for the BBC, CNN, AlJazeera, Voice of America, National Public Radio, Globo News Television and the Brazilian Radio Network – CBN. He also contributes regularly to Brazilian and international newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. A native of the state of São Paulo, Sotero holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from the Catholic University of Pernambuco, and a Master’s in Journalism and Public Affairs from the American University, in Washington, D.C. He has been an adjunct lecturer at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, and is currently on the adjunct faculty of the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University.

Ambassador Steven Steiner

Monday, August 22, 2016

Topic: Building Peace Through the Empowerment of Women in Post-Conflict Countries

Ambassador Steven E. Steiner is the gender advisor for the U.S. Institute of Peace. He previously served in the Department of State’s Office of Global Women‘s Issues and the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. He also was the director of the Department’s Iraqi Women’s Democracy Initiative. Steiner served for 36 years in the United States Foreign Service. He completed tours of duty at the U.S. embassy in Moscow and the State Department’s Offices of Soviet Union and West German Affairs and served as the deputy director of the Department’s Operations Center, its 24-hour crisis management facility. He served from 1983 to 1988 as director of Defense Programs on the National Security Council Staff. He was named by President Reagan as the U.S. representative to the Special Verification Commission, the implementing body for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), and was named by President Bush in September 1991 to serve as the U.S. Representative to the Joint Compliance and Inspection Commission, the implementing body for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).

Ambassador Steiner received the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Award in 2002, Presidential Meritorious Service Awards in 1990 and 1992, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency’s Superior Honor Award in 1993. In May 1983, he received the Department of State’s Superior Honor Award for his work on European security issues. Born in Pennsylvania, Steiner received a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University in 1963 and a Master’s Degree in international relations from Columbia University in 1966. He is a member of The Council on Foreign Relations, The Washington Institute on Foreign Affairs, and the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council, and he serves on the Board of the Council for a Community of Democracies.