Vanda Felbab-Brown

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Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence

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Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She is an expert on international and internal conflicts and their management, including counterinsurgency, organized crime, and illicit economies. She focuses particularly on South Asia, Burma, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, and Somalia. Her latest book is Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan (The Brookings Institution Press, 2012). | View Full Bio

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    Aspiration and Ambivalence

    Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan

    2012, Vanda Felbab-Brown

    "Aspiration and Ambivalence is an eminently readable blend of broad perspective and detailed fieldwork. An up-to-date and unflinchingly accurate account of where we are in Afghanistan, how we got there, and what is at stake. Its recommendations are soberly realistic. This is must reading for those trying to find the way ahead."—Ronald E. Neumann, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan (2005–07)

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Recent Activity

Refine by: Crime | Law and Security | Counternarcotics Policy | Terrorism | Environment | Corruption | Afghanistan | Pakistan | Indonesia | Southeast Asia | Mexico | Colombia | Latin America and the Caribbean | Sub-Saharan Africa

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Expert Information

Contact

Email Vanda Felbab-Brown

202.797.4396 — Gail Chalef, Director of Communications, Foreign Policy

202.797.6105 — Brookings Office of Communications

Resources

Expertise

  • Drugs and other illicit economies
  • counternarcotics policies
  • insurgency
  • civil war
  • terrorism
  • conflict management
  • stability operations and reconstruction
  • positive versus coercive inducement strategies
  • Latin America
  • Afghanistan
  • Colombia
  • Burma/Myanmar
  • Peru
  • Somalia U.S. foreign policy

Experience

Past Positions

  • Assistant Professor, Security Studies Program, Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (2007-08)

Education

  • Ph.D., MIT, 2007
  • B.A., Harvard University, 1999

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