Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. on defeating Putin

Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr. is vice president, Russia and Europe at the U.S. Institute of Peace. In 2019, he served as chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. During the Arab Spring, he oversaw U.S. assistance and support to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria. He served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009.

Ambassador Taylor also served as the U.S. government's representative to the Mideast Quartet, which facilitated the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. He served in Baghdad as the first director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office from 2004 to 2005, and in Kabul as coordinator of international and U.S. assistance to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003. Ambassador Taylor was also coordinator of U.S. assistance to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He earlier served on the staff of Senator Bill Bradley.

Ambassador Taylor is a graduate of West Point and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and served as an infantry platoon leader and combat company commander in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and Germany.

Yiorgos Allayannis is the Robert F. Bruner Distinguished Professor of Business Administration and former associate dean of Darden's Global Executive MBA (GEMBA) program. He is an expert in corporate finance, risk management, financial institutions and international finance. His work has examined the impact of derivatives on risk and firm value, corporate governance and its influence in a firm's use of derivatives for hedging, as well as firms' financial and operational hedging strategies. Other work has examined volatility and its implications for firm value distinguishing between earnings and cash flow volatility. His research has been published in leading finance journals, such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics and the Review of Financial Studies. His case-writing activity focuses in the areas of financial institutions, fintech, capital markets and international finance.

William J. Antholis has served as director and CEO of UVA's Miller Center of Public Affairs since January 2015. In that time, the Miller Center has strengthened its position as the leading nonpartisan research institution on the American presidency and worked with scholars across the University of Virginia to deliver vital research to policymakers and the public. Before coming to the Miller Center, Antholis served as managing director at the Brookings Institution from 2004 to 2014, working directly with Brookings's president and vice presidents. Antholis is the author of Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global (2013) and co-author (with Strobe Talbott) of Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming (2010). He has published articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces on U.S. politics, U.S. foreign policy, international organizations, the G8, climate change, and trade.

Dale Copeland, Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is the Hugh S. and Winnifred B. Cumming Memorial Professor of International Affairs in the UVA Department of Politics. A graduate of Queen’s University (B. Comm), Johns Hopkins (MA), and the University of Chicago (PhD), Copeland specializes in security studies and political economy. He is the author of many publications, including Economic Interdependence and War, which examines the conditions under which inter-state trade will lead to either war or peace and won the 2017 Best Book Award of the International Studies Association. He is also the author of The Origins of Major War, which studies the rise and fall of great world powers and the devastation of system-wide war. Other research interests include the origins of economic interdependence between great powers, the realist-constructivist divide, in-group/out-group theory and the logic of reputation-building, and the interconnection between international political economy and security studies.

Eric Edelman, Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, retired as a career minister from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2009, after having served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House. As the undersecretary of defense for policy (2005-2009), he oversaw strategy development as the Defense Department’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls. Edelman served as U.S. ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations and was principal deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs. Edelman has been awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, and several Department of State Superior Honor Awards.

Harry Harding, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is a specialist on Asia and U.S.-Asian relations. His major publications include Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy, 1949-1966; China’s Second Revolution: Reform after Mao; A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China since 1972; and a chapter on the Cultural Revolution in the Cambridge History of China. Currently a University Professor and professor of public policy, Harding is also adjunct chair professor in the College of Social Science at National Chengchi University in Taipei, where he holds a Yushan Scholarship, the highest honor awarded by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education. Harding served as the founding dean of UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy from 2009–14.

Aynne Kokas is assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and C.K Yen Professor at the Miller Center. Educated at the Beijing Film Academy, the University of Michigan, and with a Ph.D. from UCLA, Kokas has also been a participant in the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S. China Relations. She is the author of Hollywood Made in China, a study of the partnerships between Chinese and American producers to produce feature films for global audiences. She is currently conducting research as a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, on “Border Control on the Digital Frontier: China, the United States, and the Global Battle for Data Security.” Her work examines the risks and opportunities surrounding the collection and control of personal data through new forms of surveillance.

Scott Miller is lecturer and research associate at the UVA Darden School of Business and a research fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs. From 2019 to 2021, he held a postdoctoral fellowship in economic and business history at the Yale School of Management's International Center for Finance.

As an economic historian, Miller examines the development of modern economic systems, particularly during periods of instability and volatility. In two different veins of research, Miller uses economic crises as a lens to isolate mechanisms of change in the early American Republic and 1840s Europe, with broad corollaries for modern systems in the first and second stages of economic development. His work frames the early American republic as a resource-rich, capital- and labor-poor developing economy, which was reliant on and subject to global export markets dominated by global hegemons such as Great Britain.

John M. Owen is a Miller Center faculty senior fellow and Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics. He is the author of Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Cornell University Press, 1997) and The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change 1510-2010 (Princeton University Press, 2010). He is also co-editor of Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Owen has published work in Foreign Affairs, International Politics, International Organization, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, The National Interest, and several edited volumes. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, and the Center of International Studies at Princeton.

Allan C. Stam is a professor of public policy and politics and former dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Previously, he was director of the International Policy Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and professor of political science and senior research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Prior to moving to Michigan in 2007, he was the Daniel Webster Professor at Dartmouth College (2000-2007) and was assistant professor at Yale University (1996-2000). His research focuses on the dynamics of armed conflict between and within states. Before completing his undergraduate degree at Cornell University in 1988, where he earned a varsity letter in heavyweight crew, he served as a communications specialist on an ‘A’ detachment in the U.S. Army Special Forces and later as an armor officer in the U.S. Army Reserves. He holds an MA and PhD in political science from the University of Michigan.

Yuri Urbanovich received his M.A. in International Relations (with a concentration in International Economic Relations) from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University) in 1972 and his Ph.D. in International Relations (with a concentration in International Economic Relations) from the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1984. In the United States he attended and completed programs related to his specialization at both Harvard University (Cambridge, MA; June 1989) and The Ohio State University (Columbus, OH; Summer 1994).

From 1972 to 1975 Urbanovich worked at the regional office of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Trade in the Republic of Lithuania, and from 1976 to 1980 at the International Relations Division of the USSR Union of Cooperatives in Moscow.

After graduating from the Ph.D. program, he was invited to teach at the Diplomatic Academy. His academic interests were focused on disarmament issues, theory and technique of international negotiation, and conflict resolution. From 1986 to 1987 he served as consultant to the Soviet delegation at the Geneva Conference on Disarmament.

Brantly Womack retired as the Miller Center’s C. K. Yen Chair and professor of foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. He received his BA degree in politics and philosophy from the University of Dallas, and after a Fulbright in philosophy at the University of Munich, earned his PhD in political science from University of Chicago. He is the author of China Among Unequals: Asymmetric International Relationships in Asia (World Scientific Press 2010) and China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry (Cambridge 2006), as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters. He edited China’s Rise in Historical Perspective (Rowman and Littlefield 2010), the product of a lecture series at the Miller Center, and Contemporary Chinese Politics in Historical Perspective (Cambridge 1991). 

Francis Warnock is an expert on international capital flows, international portfolio allocation and financial sector development. His work has been featured in the Financial Times, The Economist, Barron's, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and his publications have appeared in a number of journals, including the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Housing Economics and Financial Analysts Journal.

Before coming to Darden in 2004, Warnock was a senior economist in the international finance division at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System while also teaching at Georgetown University. Warnock's international experience includes, among other things, two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi's Thyolo District. His professional career started on Wall Street, where he was a commodity trading adviser.