SIS Book Launch- Tamar Gutner, The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

About the Book:

In 2016 the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) opened its doors as China's first major foray in creating and leading an international organization with global membership. All major donor countries joined, with the exception of the United States and Japan. Today the AIIB is a medium-sized multilateral development bank (MDB) with a global membership second only to that of the World Bank.
This book explains the complexity of the AIIB: a liberal international organization designed by a group of state and MDB experts to reflect the existing norms and rules of development banking while, at the same time, it is the creation of an illiberal state that interacts with the existing order in ways that often contradict those norms and rules. Gutner argues that the AIIB is largely cut from the same cloth as other MDBs and faces similar challenges and criticism. However, a growing contradiction between conflicting Chinese institutional strategies risks turning the AIIB into the Potemkin village of China's international development and regional governance strategies―a showcase of actions that follow global norms of development banking, within a larger landscape of institutions that do not. The book advances our understanding of how institutional diffusion takes place in the system of MDBs and is a reminder of the importance of a nuanced approach to understanding China's institutional strategies.

Find more information here.

About the Author:

Tamar Gutner’s research and teaching focuses on the performance and effectiveness of international organizations, particularly international financial institutions, and their role in global and regional governance. Her current work examines the history of collaboration between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and the birth and design of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). She is the author of The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: China's Multilateral Experiment (Oxford, 2025), International Organizations in World Politics (CQ Press, 2023 and 2016), and Banking on the Environment: Multilateral Development Banks and Their Environmental Performance in Central and Eastern Europe (MIT Press).

Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as International Organization, Review of International Organizations, and Global Environmental Politics. Dr. Gutner previously served as the SIS Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Graduate Education, and as the director of the MAIR, GGPS, and IER MA programs. In 2019 she was a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow at the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO). She has received grants and fellowships from the Council on Foreign Relations, The Brookings Institution, MacArthur Foundation, International Studies Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a financial correspondent for AP-Dow Jones in New York and London.

About the Panelists:

Miles Kahler teaches and conducts research in the fields of international politics and international political economy, including global governance, international monetary and financial cooperation, and Asia-Pacific regionalism. Recent publications and projects have centered on the changing role of emerging economies in world politics and global governance, the emergence of complex global governance, sources of cosmopolitanism and parochialism in contemporary politics, and challenges to the nation-state as a dominant unit in the international system.
As Senior Fellow for Global Governance at the Council on Foreign Relations, Professor Kahler has completed projects on the competitive and complementary relations between global and regional institutions, innovation in global governance, and international efforts to combat illicit financial flows. He has been a Distinguished Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy,University of Toronto, and he has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. He serves on the editorial boards of International Organization, Global Governance, and Global Summitry.

Clemence Landers is vice president and senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development.

Prior to joining CGD, she worked at the US Treasury Department on US engagement with the multilateral development banks and as a desk economist covering several countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. Later, she served as an Advisor to the US Executive Director at the World Bank where she worked on the replenishment of the International Development Association (IDA) and represented the US government on several board committees. After leaving the Bank, she joined the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change where she led the organization’s expansion into Francophone West Africa.

Before joining the US government, Landers had a Scott Family Liberia Fellowship and served as an Advisor to the Liberian Finance Minister under Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. In this capacity she worked on Liberia’s landmark debt relief agreement and a range of economic policy issues.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

American University, School of International Service, Founders Room, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, United States