Hannes Swoboda, Austrian politician who served as a Member of the European Parliament from 1996 until 2014. He was a Member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, where he served as rapporteur on Russia; a member of the Delegation for the Relations to the United States of America; and a member of the Delegation to the Parliamentary Cooperation Committees in Central Asia. He also served as vice-president of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with south-east Europe.

Prof. Carol R. Saivetz, Senior Advisor in the MIT Security Studies Program. She is a Research Associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She has consulted for the U.S. Government on topics of security and energy politics in the Caspian and Black Sea regions. She is the author of 5 books and numerous articles on Soviet and now Russian foreign policy.

Prof. Daniela Schwarzer,

Prof. Dr. Daniela Schwarzer joined the Executive Board of the Bertelsmann Stiftung in May 2023. She is a leading expert on European and international affairs and has had a 20-year career at renowned think tanks, foundations and universities. Most recently, since 2021, she served as Executive Director for Europe and Central Asia at the Open Society Foundations, the world’s largest foundation working to strengthen the rule of law, democracy and open societies. In 2021, she was appointed honorary professor of political science at Freie Universität Berlin. In autumn 2022, she was a visiting professor at Harvard University, with which she has also been affiliated as a senior fellow. From 2016 to 2021, she was director and CEO of the German Council on Foreign Relations. (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, DGAP). Prior to that, she served as research director on the executive team of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and lead its Berlin office and Europe program.

From 2004 to 2013, she worked for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, where she headed the Europe research group beginning in 2008. From 1999 to 2004, she was an opinion page editor and France correspondent for the Financial Times Deutschland. Daniela Schwarzer is regularly consulted as an expert and policy advisor. She was co-rapporteur of the working group on EU reform and enlargement, convened by the French and German governments, which submitted its report in September 2023. From 2020 to 2022, she served as special advisor to the High Representative and Vice-President of the European Commission Josep Borrell. She also advised France and Poland during their respective EU presidencies and was a consultant to the French prime minister’s Centre dʼAnalyse Stratégique. She is a member of the supervisory boards of BNP Paribas and Covivio, an honorary board member of DGAP and a non- executive board member of the Jacques Delors Institute/Centre (Paris, Berlin) and a Council member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). In 2017, she was inducted into the French Legion of Honour.

Recent books:
Krisenzeit – Sicherheit, Wirtschaft, Zusammenhalt – Was Deutschland jetzt tun muss, Piper Verlag, München, September 2023
Final Call – Wie Europa sich zwischen China und den USA behaupten kann, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt 2021

Prof. Vesna Pusić at University of Zagreb, Croatian sociologist and politician who served as First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign and European Affairs in the centre-left cabinet of Zoran Milanović. She was Croatia’s second female Foreign Minister.

Prof. Christopher Hill, Professor Emeritus of International Relations at POLIS, University of Cambridge. He has held the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Chair of International Relations at the School of SAIS, Johns Hopkins University. He was successively Vice-Chair and Chair of the British International Studies Association between 1996-2000, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007.