Marlène Laruelle is director of the Central Asia Program (CAP) of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington DC. She is also an associate researcher with FRIDE, an associate scholar at the French Center for Russian, Caucasian and East European Studies, School of Advanced Social Sciences Studies (EHESS), and at the Post-Soviet Studies Department at Sciences Po, Paris. Marlène has expertise in Russian and Central Asian foreign policy think tanks and academia, and in Russian policy towards Central Asia. Her main areas of expertise are nationalism, national identities, political philosophy, intellectual trends and geopolitical conceptions of local elites in Russia and Central Asia.