Background
Benard grew up in the United States of America and in Austria.
Benard grew up in the United States of America and in Austria.
Stanford Law School.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Claremont McKenna College and a Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School. Benard currently works as Chief Operating Officer of Schulze Global Investments, a private equity firm focused on emerging and frontier markets. Prior to that, he was a corporate lawyer at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton Limited Liability Partnership, an international law firm, where he focused on cross-border transactions.
He has also spoken about frontier markets at numerous conferences including the annual Bank Central Asia Conference and the International Finance Corporation/EMPEA Global Private Equity Conference.
Benard has appeared on Cable News Network"s Number Bias, Number Bulletin with Campbell Brown. He has worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Department of Defense.
He has also worked in the office of Senator Chuck Hagel. Benard has conducted research for books written by two prominent foreign policy scholars: Larry Diamond"s The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World.
And Dennis Ross"s The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace.
He has been awarded several fellowships, including the Claremont Institute Publius Fellowship, the Freedom House Religious Freedom Fellowship, and the Foreign Policy Association John C. Whitehead Fellowship. He has also been named a Future Leader in Foreign Policy by the Foreign Policy Initiative and was also named to the Diplomatic Courier"s Top 99 Under 33. Alexander Benard is the son of Zalmay Khalilzad and Cheryl Benard.
Zalmay Khalilzad is an Afghan American foreign policy scholar and diplomat who most recently served as United States. ambassador to the United Nations.
He has written columns on United States. foreign policy, domestic policy, and investing in emerging and frontier markets for Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, World Affairs, the New York Post, Forbes, Policy Review, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Foreign Policy Digest, Foreign Policy, and World Politics Review.