Alex Vatanka

Vatanka has been a proponent of dialogue between the US and states in the Caucasus and Central Asia, arguing that Washington is better placed to shape domestic and foreign policies of those countries by remaining actively engaged with states such as Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. In 2015, he visited Kazakhstan as an election observer. That election was condemned as unfair by some in the United States and Vatanka was criticized for his decision to go to the country.

In 2015 he published, Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy and American Influence, covering the history of relations between Iran and Pakistan from 1947 to present day. Though the book has yet to be widely critiqued, initial commentaries were well received by academician and scholars alike, including reviews from Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution and R.K. Ramazani, Professor Emeritus of Foreign Affairs at University of Virginia.

Vatanka has not usually been targeted by the hawkish state-run media in Iran but his writings on the Iranian Green opposition movement in 2009-2010 led to some personal attacks by hardliners in Tehran, including by Kayhan, the top state-run newspaper, which at one point accused him of being a collaborator with Western intelligence services.

He was born in Tehran in 1975 and raised in Yusef Abad. His father, Buyuk Vatankhah, was among the first generation of Iranian professional footballers and a co-founder of Persepolis F.C.. Due to the escalation of the Iran-Iraq War in the mid-1980s and following the onset of the War of the Cities, Vatanka moved to Denmark in 1986 to live with an aunt. They settled in the small town of Skive on the west coast of Jutland. He later moved to Aarhus, before moving to England in 1995 to attend university. Here he completed a degree in political science (BA) at Sheffield University and an MA in International Relations at the University of Essex. His first job was as a political analyst at a small firm in Cambridge that specialized in country risk analysis. In 2001, he joined Jane's Information Group in their central office in Soho London. He began at first writing on political instability in the former Soviet South before eventually moving to become the Senior Analyst at the Middle East desk at Jane’s. In 2006, he moved to the Jane’s offices in Washington D.C., and where he is today a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute and at the Jamestown Foundation.