Evelyn Farkas Keynote Speaker

Dr. Evelyn N. Farkas is executive director of the McCain Institute at Arizona State University and brings three decades of national security and foreign policy experience across the U.S. executive and legislative branches, the private sector, and international organizations. She previously led Farkas Global Strategies, served as a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Atlantic Council, and was a national security contributor for NBC News. In 2020, she ran for Congress in New York’s 17th district.

From 2012 to 2015 she served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia, also covering the Balkans, the Caucasus, and conventional arms control. Between 2010 and 2012 she was senior advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and special advisor to the Secretary of Defense for the NATO Summit. Earlier, she was executive director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism and a senior fellow at the American Security Project.

Her earlier career includes 2001–2008 on the Senate Armed Services Committee, with responsibility for Asia Pacific, the Western Hemisphere, U.S. Special Operations Command, and policy issues including combating terrorism and export control. From 1997 to 2001 she taught international relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College, and in 1996–1997 she served in Bosnia with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). She is the author of numerous articles and opinion pieces, and of Fractured States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia, and Bosnia in the 1990s (Palgrave/St Martin’s Press).

Dr. Farkas holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She speaks Hungarian and German and has studied several other languages. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she serves on the boards of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security and American Friends of the Munich Security Conference; prior board service includes the Board of Trustees of Franklin & Marshall College. On stage, she equips audiences with clear, practical insights on complex security challenges.