Fiona Hill

Dr. Fiona Hill is a fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at The Brookings Institution. Her work has covered a diverse range of issues related to Russian democratization, Russian security, Russia’s economic transition, relations among the states of the former Soviet Union, the Caucasus region, Central Asia, and strategic issues in the Caspian Basin. She has published extensively on topics including: "Russia: The US Response to Changing Policy Imperatives" in the Fall 2000 edition of the Brookings Review; "War in the Caucasus?" in the New York Times; Russia's Tinderbox: Conflict in the North Caucasus and Its Implications for the Future of the Russian Federation; and Back in the USSR: Russia's Intervention in the Internal Affairs of the Former Soviet Republics and the Implications for United States Policy toward Russia.

From 1999-2000, Hill was the Director of Strategic Planning at the Eurasia Foundation in Washington, DC, and continues to serve as Advisor to the President on issues of strategy. She is on the Advisory Board of the Central Eurasia Project of the Open Society Institute in New York, a Board member of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting, an advisor to Public Radio International and the BBC World Service’s The World program, and a frequent commentator on Russian and Eurasian affairs. Prior to joining the Eurasia Foundation, she was the Associate Director of the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project (SDI) at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (1994-1999). From 1991-1994, she was the director of Harvard’s project on Ethnic Conflict in the former Soviet Union, coordinator of Harvard’s Trilateral Study on Japanese-Russian-US Relations, and a research associate at the Kennedy School of Government.

Hill has also been a consultant to The Hague Initiative (an international roundtable on the resolution of conflicts in the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Union, with a special focus on the 1994-1996 war in Chechnya), and a consultant to the United Nations Special Envoy and Mission to Georgia and Abkhazia. She testified before Congress on the impact of the second war in Chechnya in November 1999.

A Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University, Hill holds an M.A. degree in Russian and Modern History from St. Andrews University in Scotland; an A.M. degree in Soviet Studies and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, and has pursued studies at the Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow.

Hill was born in Bishop Auckland in County Durham, England in 1965, and now lives in the Washington D.C. area.