Steven Weber

Steven Weber works at the intersection of technology markets, intellectual property regimes, and international politics.  Weber is Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, where he directs the multi-disciplinary campus- wide Institute of International Studies.  He is also an associate with the International Computer Science Institute and an affiliated faculty of the Energy and Resources Group.   His research and consulting work for the last decade have focused on the political economy of knowledge intensive industries, with special attention to health care, information technology, software, and global trade issues.  He is also a frequent contributor to scholarly and public debates on US foreign policy.

Weber went to medical school at Stanford then did his Ph.D. in the political science department at Stanford. He served as special consultant to the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and has held academic fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  Over the last 15 years Weber has worked with multinational companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations on risk analysis, strategy, and business forecasting in the areas of international political risk, technology, and global economic change.  He serves as Senior Policy Advisor with the Glover Park Group in Washington DC.  

Weber’s most recent book, The Success of Open Source, is the leading study of the political economy of the open source software community.  He is the also the author of Cooperation and Discord in US – Soviet Arms Control, the editor of Globalization and the European Political Economy, and has written numerous articles in academic and popular publications about international political economy, globalization, emerging security issues, etc. (most recently, “How Globalization Went Bad,” in Foreign Policy 2007, and “A World Without the West,” The National Interest summer 2007).  With co-author Jonathan Sallet he is currently finishing a book on how to implement the principles of 'openness' in business strategy and government policy across four critical economic sectors:  telecommunications, software, pharmaceuticals, and media; and with co-author Bruce Jentleson of Duke, a book on how to best position the United States for a coming era of global ideological competition.