Ian Bremmer

A dedicated intellectual entrepreneur, Ian Bremmer’s career spans academic, investment, and policymaking communities. His focus has been global emerging markets—for Bremmer, those countries where political will matters at least as much to the market as economic fundamentals. Bremmer’s work to define the business of politics has accordingly focused on making political science relevant to the global marketplace. Ian Bremmer received his PhD in political science from Stanford University in 1994. Bremmer went on to the faculty of the Hoover Institution where, at 25, he became the Institution’s youngest ever National Fellow. He has held research and faculty positions at Columbia University (where he presently teaches), the EastWest Institute, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the World Policy Institute, where he has served as Senior Fellow since 1997. Bremmer’s research focuses on states in transition, global political risk, and US foreign policy. His five books include The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall (Simon & Schuster, 2006), selected by The Economist as one of the best books of 2006. Bremmer has also published over 200 articles and essays in The Harvard Business Review, The New Republic, Survival, Fortune, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He is a columnist for The International Herald Tribune and the webzine Slate, contributing editor at The National Interest, and a political commentator on CNN, FoxNews and CNBC. In 1998, with $25,000 in hand, Bremmer founded the research and consulting firm Eurasia Group. Today, Eurasia Group is the preeminent global political risk consultancy, with 80 full-time employees in New York, London, and Washington; as well as 480 experts in 65 countries worldwide. Widely respected for its objectivity, Eurasia Group has worked with government leaders (as well as opposition leaders) throughout the world. AIG, Bear Stearns, Boeing, Coca Cola, ExxonMobil, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Google, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Motorola, News Corporation, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Shell are among Eurasia Group’s more than 200 multinational clients. In 2001, Bremmer authored Wall Street’s first global political risk index, now the GPRI (Global Political Risk Index)–a joint venture with investment bank Citigroup. The GPRI brings together Eurasia Group political scientists with Citigroup economists and strategists, and represents the first time political science methodology has ever been used on Wall Street to assess risk. Throughout his career, Dr. Bremmer has spent much of his time advising world leaders on US foreign policy, including US presidential candidates from both Democratic and Republican parties, Russian Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. A native of Boston, Dr. Bremmer lives in New York.