Svante E. Cornell is Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, a Joint Research and Policy Center affilated with the School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Washington D.C., and the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy (ISDP), of which he is a co-founder and Director. Cornell was educated at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, and received his Ph.D. in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University in 2002. He was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the Behmenyar Institute for Law and Philosophy of the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences in 1999. Cornell has academic affiliations as Associate Research Professor at SAIS, and as Associate Professor of Government at Uppsala University. He is a Research Fellow with the Brussels-based Center for European Studies, and previously served as Course Chair of Caucasus Advanced Area Studies at the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute. Since 2001, he has been the Editor of the Joint Center's biweekly journal, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst (www.cacianalyst.org). His main areas of expertise are security issues, broadly defined, and state-building in the Caucasus, Turkey, and Central Asia. He is the author, among other works, of Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus (Curzon Press, 2001), the first comprehensive study of the post-Soviet Caucasus, and is co-editor, with S. Frederick Starr, of The Guns of August 2008: Russia's War in Georgia (M.E. Sharpe, 2009).