Carol R. Saivetz ’69, P’97, P’01
Affiliate, Security Studies Program
Elected May 1993
Carol R. Saivetz is a Senior Advisor in the MIT Security Studies Program. She is also a Research Associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She holds an M.I.A., M.Phil., and a PhD from Columbia University in Political Science and a certificate from what is now the Harriman Institute at Columbia. She received her BA from Brandeis University.
Between 1995-2005, she was the Executive Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and between 1992-2006 she was a Lecturer in Government at Harvard. She is currently teaching Russian Foreign Policy in the Political Science Department at MIT. Professor Saivetz has consulted for the U.S. Government on topics ranging from energy politics in the Caspian and Black Sea regions, questions of stability in Central Asia, to Russian policy toward Iran. She is the author and contributing co-editor of 5 books and numerous articles on Soviet and now Russian foreign policy issues, including an assessment of the “reset,” Russian policies toward the other Soviet successor states, and current U.S.-Russian relations. Her current research interest is energy competition in and around the Black Sea region and Russian-Turkish relations. Her most recent publications analyze the newly resurgent Russia’s policies—including energy politics, reactions to EU and NATO expansion, and Russian involvement in the current conflicts in the Post-Soviet state. She has also published opinion pieces on the Ukraine crisis, Russian intervention in Syria, and Russian approaches to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh for the Lawfare Blog (Brookings) and commented on Ukraine, Syria, and the most recent US-Russian summit for local radio and TV. She is the co-chair of the MIT seminar series “Focus on Russia,” sponsored by the MIT Security Studies Program, the Center for International Studies, and MIT-Russia.