Shawn Turner is the general manager and director of broadcasting at WKAR Public Media and a professor of strategic communication at Michigan State University. His prior positions include deputy White House press secretary for national security, director of communications for national intelligence at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and deputy press secretary for foreign affairs for the National Security Council (NSC).

Brussels Forum Session: The Odesa Debate Part II: The World’s Largest Construction Project: Laying the Foundation at the London Conference

Goran Buldioski is director of programs for Open Society–Europe and Central Asia.

Buldioski’s areas of expertise include democratic transition, civil society, citizen participation, and effective government in Europe, notably Central and Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans. Before joining the Open Society Foundations, he worked for the Council of Europe, the Macedonian Center for International Cooperation, and the National Youth Council of Macedonia. Buldioski’s publications on democracy, think tanks, and policy-relevant issues have appeared in Politico Europe, Foreign Policy, ZEIT Online, openDemocracy, Mediapart, and the Independent, among others. He is a member of the European Council of Foreign Relations.

Buldioski holds MA degrees in public policy from Central European University and in organizational behavior from George Washington University.

Brussels Forum Session: The Economic Counteroffensive: Rebuilding Ukraine

Dorothy Swann McAuliffe was appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the Office of Global Partnerships as special representative in the United States Department of State. Her office directly supports the Biden Administration’s commitment to US global leadership by assembling public-private partnerships to advance key national security and foreign policy priorities.

Among the specific aims of such collaboration are to spearhead new technology and innovation; support entrepreneurship and economic development; combat climate change and strengthen energy security; promote gender equity and human rights; and counter malign influence across the globe. Special Representative McAuliffe has forged these partnerships by engaging a diverse set of stakeholders including civil society, business, non-profit, diaspora, academic, philanthropic, faith-based, and other private sector leaders.

Prior to her appointment by President Biden, she served as the national policy advisor for Share Our Strength and the No Kid Hungry Campaign, where she worked with the private sector to build partnerships to end child hunger and advance equity in public education. As first lady of Virginia, McAuliffe founded and chaired Virginia’s Council on Bridging the Nutritional Divide, a groundbreaking initiative that forged cross-sector, public-private collaboration to improve childhood nutrition and build food access initiatives. 

Gabrielius Landsbergis is minister of foreign affairs in the 18th Government of the Republic of Lithuania. He is a member of the Seimas (parliament) for the Centras–Žaliakalnis constituency and a former member of the European Parliament as a representative of the Group of the European People's Party (Christian Democrats). Landsbergis was elected chairman of the Homeland Union in 2015. He was affirmed as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė on 11 December 2020. 

Thomas Wright is special assistant to the president and senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. Previously, he was director of the Center for the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He is author of All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21st Century and the Future of American Power (Yale University Press, 2017) and co-author, with Colin Kahl, of Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order (St. Martin’s Press, 2021). He has a PhD from Georgetown University, an MPhil from Cambridge University, and a master’s degree and bachelor’s degree from University College Dublin.

Stephen E. Biegun has more than three decades of international affairs experience in government and the private sector, including in high-level government service with the US Department of State, the White House, and Congress. In 2021, Biegun concluded his most recent government service as the US deputy secretary of state, a position to which the Senate confirmed him with a strong bipartisan vote of 90-3. In addition to his government service, Biegun also worked for two decades in the private sector as a corporate vice president with both Ford Motor Company and The Boeing Company. 

As the State Department’s second ranking diplomat, Biegun oversaw the full breadth of national security and foreign policy decision-making, reporting to the secretary of state. He led the State Department response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the evacuation of over 100,000 Americans stranded abroad during the travel shutdown. His other principal efforts focused on the Korean Peninsula, US-China relations, the broader Indo-Pacific region, US-Russia relations, Eastern Europe, and arms control.

Biegun began his career as a foreign policy specialist with the US Congress, with a focus on Russia, the former Soviet Union, and Europe, ultimately rising to a number of senior-level positions including chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and national security advisor to Senate majority leader. He spent two years as the executive secretary of the White House National Security Council, serving as an adviser and deputy to the national security advisor. In the early 1990s, Biegun led a Moscow-based technical assistance program working closely with Russia’s first post-Soviet government.

Biegun has volunteered as a board member for several international, national, and local nonprofit organizations and currently serves on the boards of the National Endowment for Democracy and the German Marshall Fund. He graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian language and political science.