Dr. Joanna Spear

Dr. Spear is a Research Professor of International Affairs and Principal Investigator of the FAO Regional Skill Sustainment Initiative. She was previously Director of the Elliott School’s Security Policy Studies Program and the Founding Director of the National Security Studies Program. Prior to joining GW, she was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Dr. Spear has published on a variety of subjects in international security, including arms control, U.S. foreign policy making, post-conflict peace building and arms exports. Her work can be found in Arms Control Today, Contemporary Security Policy, Security Studies, Strategic Analysis, Review of International Studies and World Politics Review.

Dr. Spear has held fellowships at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, the Brookings Institution, the Royal United Services Institute, the Institute for Defence and Security Analyses, New Delhi and was twice a visiting scholar at Chatham House. During 2023-24 she will be a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC.

Dr. Spear is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London. She sits on the editorial boards of the RUSI Journal and the National Defense University’s PRISM journal of complex operations.

Education

PhD Southampton University (UK)

Publications

Books and Monographs:

The Changing Labour Party, Edited with Martin J. Smith, Routledge, Reissued in 2020 as part of Routledge’s series on The Labour Movement. 246pp.

Security and Development in Global Politics: A Critical Comparison Edited with Paul D. Williams, Georgetown University Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-58901-886-0. 330pp.

Market Forces: The Political Economy of Private Military Companies, FAFO, Oslo, 2006.

The Spread of Reconnaissance Satellites and their Potential Implications for Long-Range United States National Security, for Project 2015: Strategic Vision, United States’ Joint Chiefs, 1995.

Carter and Arms Sales: Implementing the Carter Administration’s Arms Transfer Restraint Policy, Macmillan, 1995, 246pp.

Chapters in Edited Books:

‘Counterinsurgency’, in Paul D. Williams and Matthew MacDonald (eds.) Security Studies: An Introduction, Fourth Edition, Routledge, 2023. pp. 468-484.

‘United States’ Export Control Policies and Practices’, in Laurence Lustgarten (ed.), Law and the Arms Trade: Weapons, Blood and Rules, Hart Publishers, 2020. pp, 239-287.

‘Organizational Survival: NATO as a Pragmatic Functionalist’, in Ian Shapiro and Adam Tooze (eds.), Basic Documents in World Politics: The NATO Charter, Yale University Press, 2018. pp. 154-177.

‘The Militarization of United States Foreign Aid’, in Stephen Brown and Joern Graevingholt (eds.), The Securitization of Aid, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pp. 18-41.

Article:

The Personal Costs of War: Illustrated by the 2014 England Football Squad’, RUSI Journal, 165: 5-6 (January 2021), pp. 102-118.

Video:

“The Business of Armaments” Book Launch

Dr. Amy Austin Holmes

Dr. Amy Austin Holmes is Research Professor of International Affairs and Acting Director of the Foreign Area Officers Program at George Washington University. Dr. Holmes has published widely on the global American military posture, the NATO alliance, non-state actors, revolutions, military coups, and de-facto states. With more than 15 years global experience conducting research in the Middle East and Europe, including various conflict zones, she is a noted expert on issues of American foreign policy and international security.

Dr. Holmes earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and previously served as a tenured Associate Professor at the American University in Cairo. She has held Visiting Scholar positions at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, the Weatherhead Center also at Harvard University, and at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Dr. Holmes is the author of three books and more than 50 articles. 

Her first book Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge University Press) analyzed seven decades of American security relations with NATO allies Turkey and Germany. Her second book Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi (Oxford University Press) was informed by her experience of living in Egypt throughout the period of revolutionary upheaval. Her third book Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syria (Oxford University Press) is based on a pioneering field survey of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) she conducted in Northeast Syria over a period of seven years. Dr Holmes is leading a new project that involves the creation of the largest dataset in existence on the Turkish-Kurdish conflict covering four decades, in order to analyze how it has transformed across time and space.

In addition to her academic career, Dr. Holmes served as an advisor at the U.S. Department of State through a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship, where she first worked in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, focused on Iraq and Syria.  She then also served on the Turkey Desk in the Office of Southern European Affairs, which covers Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she also served as a volunteer lecturer at the Kyiv School of Economics during the summer of 2023, where she taught a course on Global Disinformation.

Select Publications 

Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Books:

Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semiautonomous Region in Northeast Syria, Oxford University Press, forthcoming January 2024

Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military, and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi, Oxford University Press, 2019

Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945, Cambridge University Press, 2014

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters:

“Dead States and Living Legacies: From the Republic of Mount Ararat to Northeast Syria” in The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy, edited by Khatchig Mouradian and Hans-Lukas Kieser, forthcoming 2024

 “Dual Refusal: How the Labor Movement Almost Toppled the Bahraini Monarchy”, in: The I.B. Tauris Handbook of Sociology and the Middle East, edited by Fatma Müge Göçek and Gamze Evcimen, December 2022

 “Myths of Military Defection in Egypt and Tunisia” (co-authored with Kevin Koehler) Mediterranean Politics, July 2018

 “Working on the Revolution in Bahrain: From The Mass Strike to Everyday Forms of Medical Provision” Social Movement Studies, July 2015

 “On Military Coups and Mad Utopias”, in: A Region of Resistance, South Atlantic Quarterly, 113:2, Duke University Press, spring 2014

 “The Base that replaced the British Empire: De-Democratization and the US Navy in Bahrain”, Journal of Arabian Studies June 2014

 “There are weeks when Decades happen: Structure and Strategy in the Egyptian Revolution” Mobilization, 17(4), December 2012, p 391-410

Selected Policy Reports, Articles, and Op-Eds:

“Five Years of Airstrikes: Turkish Aggression and International Silence in Sinjar”, (co-authored with Diween Hawezy and Brett Cohen) International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, 2 August 2021

“Threats Perceived and Real: New Data and the Need for a New Approach to the Turkish-SDF Border Conflict,” The Wilson Center, Occasional Paper, No. 39, May 2021

“Biden-Harris Should Lead on Women’s Rights and Help End Syrian Conflict”, Council on Foreign Relations Blog, March 26, 2021

“The Capitol Invasion was a Coup from Below”, Foreign Policy, January 13, 2021

“The United States Can Counter Putin and Assad With a Light Footprint in Syria”, Foreign Policy, October 21, 2020

“Despite Ceasefire Agreement, Turkey Implicated in More Than Eight Hundred Violations,” Council on Foreign Relations Blog, October 13, 2020

“Arabs Across Syria Join the Kurdish-Led Syrian Democratic Forces” MERIP, Summer 2020

“Syrian Yezidis under Four Regimes: Assad, Erdogan, ISIS, and the YPG,” Wilson Center, July 2020

“Q&A with Amy Austin Holmes.” Belfer Center Newsletter, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. (Spring 2020)

“SDF’s Arab Majority Rank Turkey as the Biggest Threat to NE Syria: Survey Data on America’s Partner Forces”, The Wilson Center, October 7, 2019

“Women, Minorities, and Military Aid to Egypt” Washington Institute, August 9, 2018

“Civil Society from Alexandria to Aswan: Survival Strategies” Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, May 31, 2018

“What Egypt’s racist campaign against Nubians reveals about Sisi’s regime” The Washington Post, April 19, 2018

“Tightening the Noose on Egypt’s Civil Society” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sada Middle East Analysis, June 1, 2017

“The Attack on Civil Society outside Cairo” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sada Middle East Analysis, January 26, 2017

“Sisi’s US Army War College Thesis: 10 Years Later”, op-ed in Mada Masr, March 15, 2016

“What are the Kurdish Women’s Units Fighting For?” The Washington Post, December 23, 2015

“What the Battle for Kobane says about U.S. overseas military bases” Washington Post, February 2, 2015

“Why Egypt’s Military Orchestrated a Massacre” Washington Post, August 22, 2014

“Before the Bloodletting: A Tour of the Rabaa Sit-in”, Cairo Review of Global Affairs, August 16, 2013

“The Royals’ New Rules: Backsliding in Bahrain”, Cairo Review of Global Affairs, February 27, 2013

Dr. Alex Finn Macartney

Dr. Alex Finn Macartney is Associate Director of the FAO Regional Skill Sustainment Initiative and an Assistant Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is a historian of radical politics and violence in Modern Japan and Modern Germany. His research and teaching specialties revolve around global and transnational history after 1945, with a particular focus on the international reaction to the US war in Vietnam.

Previously, Dr. Macartney was a visiting researcher at the Free University in Berlin and Waseda University in Tokyo. His most recent position was as a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer with the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University’s Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies. There, he taught the course “Race, Gender, and Empire in Japan and Germany, 1860 – the Present” and gave talks on the Red Army Factions in Japan and West Germany as well as anti-war GIs on foreign US bases in the Vietnam War.

His current book project, titled, Revolt Against Empire: Protest and Armed Resistance against the Vietnam War in Japan and West Germany, explores exchanges between anti-Vietnam War groups in Japan, West Germany, and the US in the 1960s and 1970s. The book focuses on the legacies of the fascist past, the transnational imagination of the 1960s, and use of political violence in both states. He has also published on the Japanese anti-imperialist movement in the Vietnam War era and protests against the Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s state visit to Europe in 1971.

Dr. Macartney received a B.A. from Lawrence University in 2010 and a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University in 2019.

Yağmur Fitzwater

Yağmur Fitzwater is a Program Coordinator for the FAO Regional Sustainment Initiative at the George Washington University. She is also a master’s degree candidate at GWU’s Elliott School of International Affairs, studying Security Policy Studies with an emphasis on U.S. National Security.

Yağmur was born in Bodrum, Turkey and lived in Istanbul to complete her bachelor’s degree in translation and interpreting studies at Bogazici University. She then moved to Ramstein, Germany where she has become conversational in German. In Germany she has participated in the efforts of Operation Allies Refuge and continues to support Afghan evacuees in the United States. She has lived in Turkey, Canada, Germany, and the United States. She speaks Turkish, English, Spanish, and conversational German. Yağmur is interested in working towards improving and strengthening U.S. foreign policy and national security.

Sandy Fauré

Sandy Fauré is a Program Coordinator for the FAO Regional Skill Sustainment Initiative at the Elliott School of International Affairs. He is a second-year master’s degree candidate in the Asian Studies program at the Elliott School, and holds a degree in political science and Chinese from St. Olaf College in Minnesota.

Sandy’s interest in Asia comes from family ties to Taiwan and China and his upbringing in the San Gabriel valley of Southern California. He began his study of Mandarin in high school and has participated in language programs in mainland China. As a second-year undergraduate, he performed fieldwork in Taiwan on agricultural policy. He completed an internship with the U.S. Department of State at its consulate in Shanghai, China and hopes to work on issues central to U.S.-China relations in the future, particularly in the areas of natural resource management and climate.