Martha Brill Olcott

Martha Brill Olcott was a senior associate with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, DC.

Olcott specializes in the problems of transitions in Central Asia and the Caucasus as well as the security challenges in the Caspian region more generally. She has followed interethnic relations in Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union for more than twenty-five years and has traveled extensively in these countries and in South Asia. Her book, Central Asia’s Second Chance, examines the economic and political development of this ethnically diverse and strategically vital region in the context of the changing security threats post-9/11.

In addition to her work in Washington, Olcott co-directs the Carnegie Moscow Center Project on Religion, Society, and Security in the former Soviet Union and the al-Farabi Carnegie Program on Central Asia in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She is professor emerita at Colgate University, having taught political science there from 1974 to 2002.

Olcott served for five years as a director of the Central Asian American Enterprise Fund. Prior to her work at the Carnegie Endowment, she served as a special consultant to former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger.

Soon after 9/11, she was selected by Washingtonian magazine for its list of “71 People the President Should Listen To” about the war on terrorism.

Olcott is the author of Tajikistan’s Difficult Development Path; In the Whirlwind of Jihad; Central Asia’s Second Chance; Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise; Preventing New Afghanistans: A Regional Strategy for Reconstruction; Getting It Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States, with Anders Åslund and Sherman Garnett; and Russia After Communism edited with Anders Åslund.