J. Scott Carpenter

J. Scott Carpenter is the Managing Director at Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas), part of Google. Previously, Carpenter was an adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. As the Institute’s Keston Family fellow from 2007-2011, Mr. Carpenter was the founding director of Project Fikra, which focuses on empowering Arab democrats in their struggle against extremism. Prior to his time at the Washington Institute, Carpenter served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. He was coordinator for the State Department’s Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiatives and was the director of the governance group for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, guiding Iraq’s postwar political transition and initiated a wide array of democracy initiatives. Before this, he served as a key advisor to CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer, facilitating the formation of the Iraqi Governing Council and the first post-Saddam Hussein cabinet, the drafting and signing of Iraq’s interim constitution. Before serving in Iraq, Mr. Carpenter was deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor where he was the bureau’s point person on a number of countries critical to U.S. democracy promotion and human rights policy. Before joining the State Department, Mr. Carpenter worked with the International Republican Institute (IRI), he established and served as co-director of IRI’s Central and Eastern Europe regional office. Mr. Carpenter also worked on the North American Free Trade Area desk at the International Trade Agency. On Capitol Hill, he worked as press secretary for Congressman Duncan Hunter of California and as a legislative assistant to Congressman Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. Mr. Carpenter holds a graduate degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in economics and European studies. He received undergraduate degrees in political science and history from Hope College in Michigan.