Charles E. Ziegler is Professor of Political Science and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of Louisville. A specialist on the domestic, foreign and security policies of Russia and Eurasia, Ziegler is co-editor (with Judith Thornton) of The Russian Far East: A Region at Risk (University of Washington Press, 2002), and author of The History of Russia (2nd edition, Greenwood Press, 2009), Foreign Policy and East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Environmental Policy in the USSR (University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). His latest edited book, Civil Society and Politics in Central Asia, was published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2015. Ziegler was also Guest Editor for a Special Issue of the journal International Relations, “Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect: BRICS and Beyond” (2016). He is currently working on a book on the great powers in Asia.

Dr. Ziegler has published over eighty book chapters and articles for such professional journals as International Studies Perspectives, International Relations, Comparative Politics, Political Science Quarterly, British Journal of Political Science, Problems of Post-Communism, International Politics, Democratization, Asian Survey, and Strategic Studies Quarterly, and has presented over 90 papers at national and international conferences. Ziegler first joined the University of Louisville in 1980, and was Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1998 to 2007.

Ziegler has held an International Research and Exchanges Board Advanced Individual Research Opportunity grant, a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to Korea, an International Affairs Fellowship of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Hoover Institution National Fellowship. In 1989 he was a visiting scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and served as Legislative Assistant for Defense and Foreign Policy to Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND). Ziegler is founder and Senior Scholar of the Center for Asian Democracy. He has served as Executive Director of the Louisville Committee on Foreign Relations since 1990, and is currently Faculty Director of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He was Project Director for a State Department funded program on building civil society in Kazakhstan, and was consultant to the PhD program at Eurasian National University in Astana. Ziegler received the BA from Purdue University, and the AM and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is married to Janna Tajibaeva and has a son, Alan.