Experts

Günther Bächler, PhD in Conflict Studies from the University of Bremen, was an Ambassador of Switzerland to Georgia; he had the mandate to represent Russian diplomatic interests in Georgia. In 2016 he was nominated as a Special Representative of the German Chairman in Office of the OSCE for the South Caucasus (Frank-Walter Steinmeier). In 2017 and 2018 he served in the same function for the Austrian and the Italian Chairmanship of the OSCE. He retired from the Foreign Service in August 2018. He serves as an adviser and senior mediator to the Swiss MFA.

Olivier de France is Research Director at The French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS) in Paris, where he runs the European affairs programme. He teaches political theory at Paris VII University, and European geopolitics at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

Anna Gussarova, Director of the Central Asia Institute for Strategic Studies (CAISS), is managing CAISS research and public activities. At the same time, she is working as a leading expert in transnational and cyber security, violent extremism and deradicalization on a permanent basis.

Hiski Haukkala is currently a Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Finland, and a non-resident Policy Expert at the Center for the Governance of AI at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford.

Walter Kemp is Senior Fellow at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. In 2018 and 2019 he established and led the Strategic Policy Support Unit in the OSCE Secretariat. Between 2010 and 2016 he was Director for Europe and Central Asia and then Vice President of the International Peace Institute (IPI). Previously he served for four years as spokesman and speechwriter at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). He has also been Senior Adviser to OSCE Chairmanships, the Secretary General and High Commissioner on National Minorities. He also supported the OSCE Panel of Eminent Persons, both in 2005 and in 2014/15. Walter, who is Canadian, holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics, as well as degrees in political science and history from the University of Toronto and McGill University.

Andrey Kortunov is Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), a non-profit partnership established by order of the President of the Russian Federation. Previously he was Deputy Director of the Institute for US and Canadian Studies. He is the founder and first president of the Moscow Public Science Foundation. He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and did postgraduate studies at the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, USSR Academy of Sciences. He has a PhD degree in History.

Reinhard Krumm, heads the FES Regional Office for Cooperation and Peace in Europe, based in Vienna. He also is a lecturer on Russian and Eastern European History at Regensburg University. In the nineties he worked as a journalist in the former Soviet Union, being the Baltic correspondent for the German press agency dpa and the Moscow correspondent of Der Spiegel magazine, and served since 2002 for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, as the Head of the Regional Central Asian office in Tashkent/Uzbekistan, as the Head of the Russian office in Moscow and from as the Head of the Department of Central and Eastern Europe, Berlin.

Lukasz Kulesa is currently Deputy Head of Research at the Polish Institute of International Affairs (PISM). His research interests include nuclear and conventional deterrence and arms control, NATO and Russian security policy, and WMD non-proliferation. Between 2014 and 2019, he worked as Research Director at the European Leadership Network (London).

Alexandra Martin has joined GLOBSEC as Strategic Forums Director in May 2018 where she leads the efforts for the major policy convenings. From January 2020 she heads the GLOBSEC Brussels Office. She previously worked as Political Officer for the OSCE Mission to Skopje. She worked with the German Marshall Fund Washington Office from 2015 to 2017 and served as Operations Officer with the EU Monitoring Mission in Georgia between 2012 and 2014. She has a Masters in Conflict Management and Economics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Zachary Paikin is a Researcher in EU Foreign Policy at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels (CEPS). He is also a Nonresident Research Fellow at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy in Toronto and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Global Policy Institute in London. He holds additional affiliations with the Minsk Dialogue Council on International Relations and the Network for Strategic Analysis, funded by Canada’s Ministry of National Defence. He is a member of FES ROCPE’s “Fresh Look on Eastern European Trends” (FLEET) project as well as the European Leadership Network’s YGLN contact group on Euro-Atlantic security. Paikin was named a GLOBSEC Young Leader in 2019 and holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Kent.

Yauheni Preiherman is the Founder and Director of the Minsk Dialogue Council on International Relations. His main research interests include the foreign policies of small states, international affairs in Eastern Europe, and Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security. Yauheni is a regular contributor to the Eurasia Daily Monitor by the Jamestown Foundation (USA), Valdai Discussion Club (Russia), Global Brief (Canada) and other Belarusian and international publications.

Sonja Stojanović Gajic is the Director of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, a leading independent think-thank in the Western Balkans for security studies. She is the author of methodology for measuring security sector reform in a transitional society from a perspective of civil society and chief methodologist for regional collaborative research on progress of security sector reform in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.

Nathalie Tocci is Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali, Honorary Professor at the University of Tübingen, and Special Adviser to High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini, on behalf of whom she wrote the European Global Strategy and is now working on its implementation, notably in the field of security and defence. Previously she held research positions at the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels, the Transatlantic Academy, Washington and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence.

Tony van der Togt is an Associate Senior Research Fellow at the Clingendael Institute in the Netherlands, who has published widely on EU/NATO-Russia relations, Wider Europe and Greater Eurasia. As a former diplomat, working on and in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, he now also functions as Strategic Policy Adviser in the European Department of the Dutch MFA.

Olesya Vartanyan is Crisis Group’s Analyst for the EU Eastern Neighbourhood. Based in Tbilisi, she researches and produces reports on regional security issues in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, with a particular focus on breakaway regions in the South Caucasus – Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia.

Julie Wilhelmsen is Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and former head of the Russia program at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. The two post-Soviet Chechen wars have been a constant focus in her research and she heads projects aiming to facilitate research on the North Caucasus. Wilhelmsen has been editor of the journal International Politik. She was a member of the Norwegian Government Expert Group for the Defence of Norway.