Janine R. Wedel

Janine R. Wedel, an award-winning author, writes about power networks, shadow elites, informality, and weaponized corruption through the lens of a social anthropologist. A Distinguished University Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, she is also a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm, and a Faculty Associate of the Petrach Program on Ukraine. She additionally has served as a Global Policy Chair at the University of Bath, UK; a fellow at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin; and a fellow at the New America Foundation. Her forthcoming book, Elite Influence: Everything You Need to Know, will be published by Oxford University Press. Her most recent book, Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security (Pegasus 2014; updated Kindle & paperback 2016), which exposes new forms of legal corruption, was named in Bloomberg’s survey of 2014 favorite reads. 

Wedel is a pioneer in applying anthropological insights to topics dominated by political science and economics. Choice writes that "as a thinker she is in the same league as John Kenneth Galbraith and Charles Lindblom." Her books—widely and favorably reviewed—include the award-winning Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market (Basic Books, 2009) and Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2001). Shadow Elite was book of the month for The Huffington Post and received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Collision and Collusion, winner of the Grawemeyer Award, was named "impressive and informative" by Foreign Affairs and "a key text in the critics' armory" by The New York Times Magazine. American Ethnologist called it "a tribute to the high caliber of Wedel's journalistic and anthropological abilities alike." Wedel's first book, The Private Poland (1986) was likened by the Christian Science Monitor to Hedrick Smith's The Russians and called "a brilliant account of contemporary Polish society" by Osteuropa Wirtschaft. Wedel has also published Political Rigging: A Primer on Political Capture and Influence in the 21st Century (2017, with Nazia Hussain and Dana A. Dolan); Confronting Corruption, Building Accountability (2010, with Lloyd J. Dumas); and The Unplanned Society: Poland During and After Communism (edited, translated, annotated and introductions, 1992), which the anthropology journal Man called a "pioneering work."

A public intellectual, Wedel has contributed congressional testimony and analysis pieces to more than a dozen major outlets, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal Europe, Washington Post, Nation, Politico, Salon, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, USA Today, Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and Project Syndicate. She was a featured columnist in The Huffington Post. She has been invited to speak at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, MIT, Chicago, Berkeley, Oxford, Central European University (Budapest), Institute of Social Studies (the Hague), United Nations University (Helsinki), Freie Universität (Berlin), TEDx (Berlin), Bruno Kreisky Institute (Vienna), European Journalism Observatory (Lugano), New America Foundation, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, National Press Club, and National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, among others. Her television and radio appearances include MSNBC, CNN, PBS's Frontline, C-Span, Al-Jazeera, BBC, and NPR.

A five-time Fulbright fellow, she also won the (2001) Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (whose previous holders include Mikhail Gorbachev and Samuel Huntington), as well as major awards from the National Science Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of America, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Swedish Research Council, Horizon Europe, Social Science Research Council, German Marshall Fund, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, New America Foundation, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Institute for New Economic Thinking, among others. Her work has been favorably reviewed and quoted in the New York Review of Books, Economist, New York Times, Newsweek, Financial Times, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Investor's Business Daily, New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Publishers Weekly, among many others. It has been reviewed or translated into more than a dozen languages, including Polish, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Serbian, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, Mandarin, and Japanese.

Wedel is co–founder and past president of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP), a section affiliated with the American Anthropological Association.