Robert Legvold

Columbia University

Robert Legvold is Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, where he specialized in the international relations of the post-Soviet states. He was director of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, from 1986 to 1992. Prior to coming to Columbia in 1984, he served for six years as senior fellow and director of the Soviet Studies Project at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. For most of the preceding decade, he was on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at Tufts University. He received his PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1967. From 2008 to 2010 he was project director for “Rethinking U.S. Policy toward Russia” at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2010 to 2012 he directed the “Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative” sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is currently visiting professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

Legvold’s works include Return to Cold War (Polity Books, 2016); a collaborative volume, Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Columbia University Press, 2007); and with Timothy Colton and Timothy Frye, The Policy World Meets Academia: Designing U.S. Policy toward Russia (The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2010).

Legvold’s videos are used in these Choices Program curriculum units:
Immigration and the U.S. Policy Debate
Russia’s Transformation: Challenges for U.S. Policy