Dr. Alexander Sokolowski serves as Deputy Assistant Administrator (DAA) in the Bureau for Europe and Eurasia at USAID. In this capacity, he assists in the oversight of the agency's development policy in the region and a portfolio of bilateral and regional programs in democracy and governance, energy security and economic growth. A career member of the Senior Executive Service, he brings over 16 years of service at USAID and over two decades of work on development in the Europe and Eurasia region.
Prior to joining the E&E Front Office, he served as the Bureau's Democracy and Governance Division Chief since 2009. In this capacity, he provided advice and technical assistance on elections assistance and political party development to the bureau and regional Missions. He was also one of the main authors of the Agency's 2013 Democracy Rights and Governance Strategy.
Prior to joining USAID in June 2003, he taught Comparative Politics at George Washington University as an adjunct professor. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in November 2002, writing his dissertation on the structural and political determinants of fiscal and social policy failure in Yeltsin’s Russia. He has served as a Foreign Policy Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution (2000-2001). He also holds master’s degrees from Princeton (2000) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1994), and a B.A. from Amherst College (1991). Through the mid to late 1990s, he worked for the National Democratic Institute’s Moscow office as a Political Party Program Officer and Political Analyst. Fluent in Russian, he has published articles on Russian politics in academic journals (Europe-Asia Studies, Demokratizatsiya) and opinion pieces (The Moscow Times).