J Alex Thier

In August 2010, J Alexander Thier was sworn in as assistant to the administrator for the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs.

Prior to joining USAID, Thier served as director for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) and chair of the Institute’s Afghanistan and Pakistan Working Groups. At USIP, Thier co-authored The Future of Afghanistan (2009) in addition to co-authoring the final report of the Afghanistan Working Group, chaired by General James Jones, and the 2008 report of the Pakistan Working Group, The Next Chapter: The United States and Pakistan. Thier also served USIP as senior adviser to the Rule of Law Center for Innovation, where he focused on building up USIP’s rule of law program in Afghanistan and as a principal staffer on the Genocide Prevention Task Force.

Thier has also worked as director of the Project on Failed States at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. From 2002 to 2004, he was legal adviser to Afghanistan’s Constitutional and Judicial Reform Commissions in Kabul, where he assisted in the development of a new constitution and judicial system. Thier has also worked as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, a legal and constitutional expert to the British Department for International Development and as an adviser to the Constitutional Commission of Southern Sudan.

From 1993 to 1996, Thier worked as a U.N. and NGO official in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the country’s civil war, where he was the officer-in-charge of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan in Kabul. He also served as coordination officer for the U.N. Iraq Program in New York. As an attorney, Thier was a Skadden fellow and a graduate fellow at the U.S. National Security Council’s Directorate for Near-East and South Asia. He received the Richard S. Goldsmith award for outstanding work on dispute resolution from Stanford University in 2000.

Thier has a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a Master of Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a B.A. from Brown University.