Janine Wedel

Janine R. Wedel, a university professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, writes about issues of governing, corruption, foreign aid, and influence elites through the lens of a social anthropologist. Winner of the 2001 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (previous holders include Mikhail Gorbachev and Samuel Huntington), she is a pioneer in applying anthropological insights to topics dominated by political science and economics. Choice writes that “as a thinker she is in the same league as John Kenneth Galbraith and Charles Lindblom."

Wedel’s books—widely and favorably reviewed (http://janinewedel.info/books.html) —include the award-winning Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (Basic Books, 2009) and Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2001). Shadow Elite was book of the month for The Huffington Post and received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Collision and Collusion, winner of the Grawemeyer Award, was named "impressive and informative" by Foreign Affairs and "a key text in the critics' armory" by The New York Times Magazine. American Ethnologist called it “a tribute to the high caliber of Wedel's journalistic and anthropological abilities alike.” Wedel’s first book, The Private Poland (1986) waslikened by the Christian Science Monitor to Hedrick Smith's The Russians and called “a brilliant account of contemporary Polish society” by Osteuropa Wirtschaft. Wedel has also published the coauthored Confronting Corruption, Building Accountability (