BIOGRAPHY
Janine R. Wedel writes about power, influence, and public policy through the unique lens of a social anthropologist. A professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, Wedel is the first anthropologist to win the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Previous award recipients include Mikhail Gorbachev and Samuel Huntington.
After nearly 30 years studying communist and post-communist societies, Wedel has turned some of her energies to the United States. Her new book Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (Basic Books) charts a new system of power and influence at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Operating in United States, the post-communist sphere, and across the globe, the prime movers in this system make public decisions without public input in realms from finance and foreign affairs to government and society. They test both governments' rules of accountability and businesses' codes of competition, ultimately answering only to each other and challenging democracy from the inside. Shadow Elite is Arianna's January 2010 Book Club selection for The Huffington Post. Shadow Elite received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, Vanity Fair featured the book in its "Hot Type" column and The Daily Beast selected it as a "Hot Read."
In addition to Shadow Elite and the prize-winning Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2001), Wedel has published The Unplanned Society (edited, annotated, and introductions, Columbia University Press, 1992) and The Private Poland (1986), which was likened by the Christian Science Monitor to Hedrick Smith's The Russians. She has contributed congressional testimony and articles and opinion pieces to more than a dozen major outlets, including The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Nation, The National Interest, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, and Salon. A four-time Fulbright fellow, Wedel has also won awards from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the United States Institute of Peace, the German Marshall Fund, the Eurasia Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the New America Foundation, among others. She was recognized as one of a handful of "Distinguished Alumni" Ph.D.s chosen to speak at the Berkeley anthropology department's centennial celebration.
Wedel developed and directs the initiative on Outsourcing National Security at the New America Foundation. She is co-founder and convener of the Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy (IGAPP).
