Sanctioning Russia: Assessing Economic Implications and Impact to Energy Markets

About the Speakers

Meghan L. O’Sullivan is the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project at Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the Chair of the North American Group of the Trilateral Commission. Her third book, Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power, was published by Simon & Schuster in September 2017.

Dr. O’Sullivan has extensive experience in policy formulation and in negotiation. Between 2004 and 2007, she was Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan during the last two years of her tenure. There, she helped run two strategic policy reviews: one on Afghanistan in the summer of 2006 and one on Iraq in late 2006 and early 2007, which led to the “surge” strategy. In her job at the National Security Council, Dr. O’Sullivan was responsible for building consensus around new policy directions in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as overseeing their execution. Dr. O’Sullivan spent two years from 2003-2008 in Iraq, most recently in the fall of 2008 to help negotiate and conclude the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and strategic framework agreement between the United States and Iraq. During an earlier posting in Baghdad, O’Sullivan also helped negotiate the Transitional Administrative Law, which was the interim constitution of Iraq from 2004-2006.

From July 2013 to December 2013, Professor O’Sullivan was the Vice Chair of the All Party Talks in Northern Ireland. These negotiations sought to resolve issues that have been persistent obstacles to achieving a more durable peace in Northern Ireland since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Other positions held by Dr. O’Sullivan also included Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Southwest Asia in the NSC in 2004; Political Advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Administrator and Deputy Director for Governance in Baghdad; Chief Advisor to the presidential envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process; and a Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Professor O’Sullivan is on the board of Raytheon Technologies and the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a senior advisor at Macro Advisory Partners, where she co-heads the Energy Transition Advisory Practice. She is also a member of the International Advisory Group for the British law firm, Linklaters, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, and a consultant to energy companies. She is a trustee of the International Crisis Group and a member of the board of The Mission Continues, a non-profit organization to help veterans. She is also on the advisory committee for the Women’s Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute as well as Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy. She was a Henry Crown Fellow from 2015-2017 and a Henry Luce Fellow from 1991-1992.

Professor O’Sullivan has written several books and many articles on international affairs. She has been awarded the Defense Department's highest honor for civilians, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, and three times been awarded the State Department's Superior Honor Award. In 2008, Esquire Magazine named her one of the most influential people of the century. O’Sullivan earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Georgetown University, a Masters of Science in economics, and a Doctorate in politics from Oxford University.

Alexandra Vacroux is Executive Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Her scholarly work addresses many Russian and Eurasian policy issues. In addition, she teaches  popular courses on the comparative politics of Eurasia and post-Soviet conflict. She has mentored dozens of Harvard’s best and brightest Russian regional studies students and scholars. She is an active member of the bilateral Working Group on the Future of U.S.–Russia Relations, and co-chairs the Davis Center's long-running Comparative Politics Seminar. 

Prior to joining the Davis Center in 2010, Alexandra held a variety of scholarly and business positions in the American and Russian capitals. In Washington, DC, she was a Scholar at the Kennan Institute (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars). While living in Moscow for more than a decade in the 1990s, she was consultant to the Russian Privatization Agency, President of the American brokerage for the Brunswick Warburg investment bank, and member of the board of United Way Moscow. She also served as research associate at the Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR), a Russian think tank associated with the New Economic School. 

She is recipient of a Dean’s Distinction Award from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and of the Alumni Award from the Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) Program at Tufts.

As a commentator, she has been praised as "refreshing," "straightforward," and "quick and to the point." She has appeared on stations ranging from WBUR, Fox News Radio, China Central TV, Hromadske TV (Ukraine), and speaks regularly at community forums at home and abroad. 

She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.

About the Moderator

Edoardo Campanella is an economist and author. He works as senior global economist at UniCredit Bank and he recently published with Marta Dassu’ Anglo Nostalgia: the Politics of Emotion in a Fractured West (Oxford University Press). He writes globally syndicated columns for Project Syndicate, and his writings have appeared, among the others, in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Survival and many other media outlets. Edoardo is also David Rockefeller Fellow of the Trilateral Commission, where he is co-directing the Taskforce on Global Capitalism in Transition — co-chaired by Carl Bildt (former Swedish PM), Kelly Grier (US Chair and Americas Managing Partner, Ernest & Young) and Takeshi Ninami (CEO of Suntory Group). He previously worked for the economic research departments of the World Trade Organisation, the World Economic Forum and the Italian Senate. In 2016, he was a shortlisted author for the Bracken Bower Prize, awarded by the Financial Times and McKinsey to promising writers under the age of 35. He holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School that he attended on a Fulbright scholarship. While at Harvard, he was awarded the Certificate for Teaching Excellence for his teaching activity.

He is also affiliated with ISPI, the Aspen Institute, the Centre for the Governance of Change of IE University in Madrid and the Council for Italy and the United States. During his M-RCBG senior fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, Edoardo will work on the future of capitalism, studying, in particular, how three macro trends — the green transition, the digital revolution and rising inequalities — will affect the balance between the market and the state (project title: Reconceiving Capitalism in a Post-Pandemic World: Towards a New Global Order). His study will go beyond a monolithic view of capitalism, focusing on how different types of capitalism react to the same mega trends. His faculty sponsor is Robert Lawrence, Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment, Harvard Kennedy School.