About Us

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Elisabeta Dinu

Elisabeta is a doctoral candidate in Public Policy at Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, Austria, having submitted her dissertation and currently awaiting defense. She was a Visiting Researcher at the University of St Andrews in the UK and a Research Fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin. Her research also led her to conduct fieldwork in Lebanon. At CEU, she served as a Research Assistant for a project on the history of terrorism, working with press archives in several languages, and worked as a Teaching Assistant for courses in Policy Analysis, Public Management, and Terrorism and Counterterrorism. She also worked as a policy advisor in the private sector, focusing on digital policy, and in the Leadership Programs Department of the Aspen Institute Romania. She holds an MA in Public Policy from CEU and an MA in Comparative Politics from the University of Bucharest. Her regional expertise lies in the Middle East and North Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, and more broadly, the politics of the European Union. She is interested in global policy dynamics, security and non-state actors, strategy and organizations, as well as policy learning and innovation. She is working on turning her doctoral dissertation, focused on explaining why some armed non-state actors grow into hybrids, into a book.

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Christopher LaRoche

Christopher David LaRoche is an assistant professor at the Department of International Relations, Central European University, visiting faculty in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program in New York City, and a non-resident fellow at the European Centre for North Korean Studies. His research focusses on international institutions, nuclear security, and political psychology. Before joining CEU, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the China Institute, University of Alberta, and a fellow at the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

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Christopher McIntosh

Christopher McIntosh began teaching at Bard in 2010.  He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from The University of Chicago, specializing in international relations and has an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown. His principal research and teaching interests revolve around international relations, security studies, temporality, and post-structural theory.  His primary research focuses on how the concept of war in contemporary international politics is constituted by sovereignty and the implications it has for the practice of political violence. This research builds on his dissertation, “What Makes a War, a War? Sovereignty, War, and the Subject of International Politics”.  At Bard he teaches courses on global ethics, sovereignty and war, terrorism, security, and international relations. Prior to Bard, Professor McIntosh has worked at CSIS and the Office of Naval Intelligence.

A.B., Political Science, University of Georgia; M.A., Security Studies, Georgetown University; M.A, Ph.D., Political Science, University of Chicago. At Bard since 2010.

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Erzsebet Strausz

Erzsebet Strausz is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at Central European University in Vienna, where she teaches MA courses on international relations theory, international security and critical approaches. She holds a PhD from Aberystwyth University and her dissertation received the British International Studies Association’s Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize in 2013. Her research focuses on critical security studies, critical pedagogy, the politics of everyday life as well as creative, experimental and narrative methods in the study of world politics. Before joining CEU she taught at the University of Warwick where she was co-investigator of the Wellcome Trust-funded project 'Counterterrorism in the NHS: Evaluating Prevent Duty Safeguarding by Midlands Healthcare Providers.’ She was awarded the British International Studies Association’s Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize in 2017. More recently, she published a research monograph Writing the Self and Transforming Knowledge in International Relations: Towards a Politics of Liminality (Routledge, 2018) and together with shine choi and Anna Selmeczi, she is co-editor of Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics: Creativity and Transformation (Routledge, 2019). Erzsébet was also the recipient of the CEU Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020.

PhD in International Politics, Aberystwyth University; MA in International Relations and European Studies, CEU.

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Colleen Thouez

Colleen Thouez is the Director and Founder of the Refugee Resettlement Initiative at the National Association of Higher Education Systems, which supports university campuses to serve as communities of welcome for forcibly displaced students and their families who have recently arrived in the United States.  Dr. Thouez is a faculty at Bard College, a senior fellow at the New School’s Zolberg Institute, and a senior visiting fellow at SciencesPo Paris.  She has held previous academic positions at Columbia University’s Global Policy Initiative (2016-2018), and at American University School of International Service (2010-2012).  In 2022, she co-founded Europe Prykhystok, connecting Ukrainian and European communities in order to provide short-term get-aways for 700 Ukrainian children so far, many of whom are recently orphaned.  From 2017-2021, Dr. Thouez served as the inaugural director of the Welcoming and Inclusive Cities Division at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), where she conceived the Mayors Migration Council (MMC) and its Global Cities Fund for Pandemic Relief (2019), the Africa-Europe Mayors Dialogue (2020), and the University Alliance for Refugees and At-Risk Migrants (2018).  Before joining OSF, for 17 years, she held leadership positions at the United Nations in the dual fields of adult education and international migration.  From 2004-2010, she was the Head of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), the UN’s main training arm in New York, where she was responsible for the training of thousands of government delegates annually on all aspects of international law and the UN.  Dr. Thouez is also widely recognised for having driven advances in migration governance. She served as special advisor to the late Sir Peter Sutherland, the UN Secretary-General’s representative on migration until 2018; and, she continues to advise national governments, municipal governments, regional bodies, and UNHCR, IOM, the World Bank, OSCE, amongst others. Colleen is the Chair of the Advisory Board for the new Global Centre for Climate Mobility (GCCM), and a member of the Advisory Council of the Henry J. Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Her most recent academic publications are “New power configurations: city mobilization and policy change” (2022) in Global Networks; and “Cities as emergent international actors in the field of migration” (2020), Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations.

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James Ketterer

James Ketterer is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College. He recently completed a 4-year term as Dean of the School of Continuing Education at the American University in Cairo, where he worked closely with the US Embassy in Egypt on projects that combined education, the arts and public diplomacy. He also served in Egypt as Country Director for AMIDEAST, an American educational NGO that works to enhance educational and cultural ties between the US and the Middle East and North Africa. Previously at Bard he was Dean of International Studies and Director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, taught courses on diplomacy and the Middle East and directed a summer institute on foreign policy supported by the US Department of State. He was Deputy Provost and Vice Chancellor at the State University of New York, where he was also Director of the Center for International Development, which implemented USAID-supported democracy projects in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ketterer works on election missions with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, including in Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan. He previously worked at the New York Senate and in the Near East-South Asia directorate of the National Security Council at the White House. He was a Boren Fellow in Morocco and a Rotary Ambassadorial Fellow at the Bourguiba Institute of Languages in Tunisia. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Belgrade and Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, and is on the board of trustees of the Swedish Program, a liberal arts study abroad program based at the Stockholm School of Economics.