Nikolas Kirrill Gvosdev is professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an instructor at the Harvard Extension School, Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow for national security affairs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and editor of its journal Orbis.
Gvosdev is a co-author of Decision-Making in American Foreign Policy (2019), U.S. Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Evolution of an Incidental Superpower (2015) and Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors and Sectors (2013). He was a co-editor for the Oxford Handbook of U.S. National Security.
Gvosdev is a frequent commentator on U.S. foreign policy and international relations, the intersection of geopolitics and geo-economics, Russian and Eurasian affairs, and developments in the Middle East.
The title of his speech is "On the Move: What Mass Migration Tells Us About the Geopolitical and Geoeconomic State of the World."
In 2021, Sophie Eisentraut and her colleagues at the Munich Security Conference coined the term "polypandemic" to describe a series of mutually-reinforcing crises (climate, pandemics, hunger, political instability, and so on) that would threaten to destabilize the global system. At the same time, as the world moves into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Parag Khanna argues that the defining feature of the 21st century will be a "competition for talent" as nations compete for the skills and talents that will ensure national success. At this inflection point in world affairs, in conditions when globalization is fracturing and a possible new Cold War looms, how is migration exacerbating both domestic tensions and international stability? And in the midst of crisis, are there new opportunities for the United States?
