Clements Center to host two leading experts on [br]Asia and the Middle East this week[/br]

Randall Schriver of Armitage International and the LBJ School’s Dr. Josh Eisenman will be speaking this Tuesday, April 7th in SRH 3.124 at 5:15pm. The two will discuss China’s desire for greater influence in East Asia, how this affects the United States, and how the United States and its allies should respond to growing Chinese pressure and assertive behavior in the region.

Mr. Randall Schriver is one of five founding partners of Armitage International LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in international business development and strategies, and is CEO and President of the Project 2049 Institute, a nonprofit research organization dedicated to the study of security trend lines in Asia. He is also a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs responsible for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Mongolia, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. Prior to his work at the State Department, he served for four years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) as a civil servant. As Senior Country Director for the PRC, Taiwan, and Mongolia in OSD from 1997 to 1998, he was the senior official responsible for the day-to-day management of U.S. bilateral relations with the People’s Liberation Army, and the bilateral security & military relationships with Taiwan. His political experience includes service on the Bush-Cheney Defense Transition Team, and work on the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign as a member of the Asia Policy Team. 

Dr. Joshua Eisenman is an assistant professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and senior fellow for China studies at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. Between 2003-2005 he served as a professional policy analyst on the Congressionally-mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He has also worked as fellow at the New America Foundation and assistant director of China studies at the Center for the National Interest (formally The Nixon Center).

Mr. Sahner will provide a macro-level talk on the reordering of the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the present, with special emphasis on the great powers, ethnic and religious minorities, and the Arab Spring. 

Christian studies the Middle East, in particular, the transition from late antiquity to the early Islamic period, relations between Muslims and Christians, and the history of Syria.

He received his AB summa cum laude in Art and Archaeology from Princeton in 2007. He then studied as a Rhodes Scholar at St John’s College, Oxford, where he earned his M.Phil with distinction in Arabic and Byzantine Studies in 2009. After, he returned to Princeton, earning an MA in History with distinction in 2011. In 2012, he completed advanced Arabic language study at the Institut français du Proche-Orient in Beirut.

His dissertation, which he expects to submit in the spring of 2015, is entitled “Christian Martyrdom in the Early Islamic Period.” It aims to fill a major lacuna by providing the first scholarly account of violence against Christians in the early medieval Middle East. The dissertation centers around a collection of largely unstudied Christian hagiographical texts in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Georgian, and Armenian. He pairs these with Muslim legal and historical sources in the hopes of giving a robust and balanced picture of conversion, apostasy, and blasphemy in the early years after the Arab conquest.

Christian is the author of Among the Ruins: Syria Past and Present (Oxford University Press/ C. Hurst & Co.), an introduction to the war-torn country that blends elements of history, reportage, and memoir from my time in the Levant. His essays on the culture and history of the Middle East have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications.