Speakers

Dalia Bankauskaite

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Dalia Bankauskaite

Dalia Bankauskaitė is an interdisciplinary expert in security policy, strategic communication, and policy advice. She is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), working on its Democratic Resilience Program, teaches strategic communication as a Partnership Associate Professor at the University of Vilnius, and provides expertise to the Swedish Defence University. She is also an associate member of the Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies and leads the Baltic States desk of Warsaw's Center for International Relations (CSM). Drawing on decades of experience across government, academia, and consulting, she focuses on advancing the understanding of total defence doctrine and a whole-of-society approach to security. Her work includes analysing hybrid aggression and influence operations, as well as developing comprehensive programmes for media literacy, societal resilience, and capacity building. She has extensive professional experience in strategic communications across Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Baltic Sea region. Positions held throughout her career include leading Lithuania's EU Public Information Unit ahead of the country's accession to the EU, serving as an information officer at the European Commission Delegation, and working at the Lithuanian Embassy in Moscow. She holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Małgorzata Bonikowska

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Małgorzata Bonikowska

Susanna Cafaro

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Susanna Cafaro

Susanna Cafaro is a full professor of European Union Law at the University of Salento. She is the coordinator of the Jean Monnet Center of Excellence EUmanity Demos – Democracy for Europe and Humanity, located at the same university. She also holds a Jean Monnet Chair on  "European Supranational Democracy: a Lab for the World."
She is author of numerous scientific publications, her research focuses on European Union institutions, economic governance and external relations, law of international organizations, global governance, democracy. 
She is an advisor to the Institute for the Development of a Global Democratic Republic and has carried out consultancy and research for the European Parliament and the European Central Bank. 
She was a member of the Scientific Committee for the Future of Europe  established by the Italian Government (2020-2021). Since 2023, she has been in the directirs' board of the journal "Athena. Critical Enquiries in Law, Philosophy, and Globalization" and is a member of numerous national and international scientific and editorial committees of academic journals and book series.

Jean-Louis De Brouwer

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Jean-Louis De Brouwer

Jean-Louis De Brouwer is Director of the European Affairs Programme at the Egmont Institute (Royal Institute for International Relations) in Brussels, which he joined in October 2019. His work focuses on Justice and Home Affairs, social policies, and sustainable development. He spent much of his career at the European Commission, where as a director he was successively responsible for immigration, asylum, visa and border policies (DG Justice and Home Affairs); the implementation of the EU2020 agenda and employment policies (DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion); and humanitarian aid operations and policies (DG European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations). Before joining the Commission, he held positions in the Belgian civil service at the Ministries of Economic Affairs and Home Affairs, and served as Director General of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences. He is a frequent author on EU migration, asylum, and humanitarian policy. He teaches Public Law, Political Science, and EU Politics at Saint-Louis University Brussels (USL-B) and the Catholic University of Mons (FUCAM), lectures on International Relations theory and the EU's Area of Freedom, Security and Justice at UCLouvain and USL-B, and leads a course on immigration and humanitarian policy at the College of Europe's Parma campus. He holds a Master's degree in Law, Sociology, and Public Administration/International Relations from the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL).

Constantinos Filis

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Constantinos Filis

Constantinos Filis is the Director of the Institute of Global Affairs at the American College of Greece and an Associate Professor there, teaching international relations and European affairs. He also heads the Russia, Eurasia and Southeast Europe Centre at Panteion University's Institute of International Relations, where he previously served as Executive Director (2019–2021) and Director of Research Programs (2012–2019). A specialist in Russian foreign policy, energy geopolitics, and Greek-Turkish relations, he is a frequent commentator in the Greek and international media. After his PhD, he was elected a Senior Associate Member at St Antony's College, Oxford, and held a research fellowship at SEESOX. He lectures at Greece's principal defence institutions and sits on the boards of the Greek-Turkish Forum, the Institute of Energy for South-East Europe, and the Delphi Economic Forum. He has published extensively. His recent books include "Assertive Patriotism," "Greece in its Neighborhood," "A Closer Look at Russia and its Influence in the World," "Turkey, Islam, Erdoğan," and "Refugees, Europe, Insecurity," alongside a more recent work on how the war in Ukraine is reshaping the global landscape. He holds a BA in Political Science and History from the University of La Verne, an MA in Global Governance from the University of Reading, and a PhD in Russian foreign policy, also from the University of Reading.

Elena Lazarou

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Elena Lazarou

Elena Lazarou is the Director General of ELIAMEP (the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy) in Athens. An international affairs expert with over twenty years' experience across international organisations, think tanks, and universities, she specialises in EU foreign policy, global geopolitics, transatlantic relations, and security and defence. At the European Parliament, she served as Head of the External Policies Unit of the Research Service (EPRS) and as Senior Policy Analyst, leading research teams on foreign policy, defence, and transatlantic relations. She has also headed the Centre for International Relations of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Brazil and the Euro-Mediterranean Observatory of the Hellenic Centre for European Studies (EKEM). She is a Fellow at Chatham House, a Senior Advisor at the European Policy Centre, and was the official candidate of Greece and Cyprus for the directorship of the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS). In her academic career, she was Assistant Professor of International Relations at the FGV and taught and conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, the University of Sheffield, and the London School of Economics. She has served on bodies including the G20's Think 20 group and the Council on Foreign Relations' Council of Councils, and contributes regularly to the Greek and international press. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

Karel Lannoo

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Karel Lannoo

Karel Lannoo is the Chief Executive of CEPS, Europe's leading independent think tank on EU affairs, a position he has held since 2000. Ranked among the top ten think tanks in the world, CEPS conducts evidence-based policy research and serves as a forum for European and global policy debate. He has published several books on capital markets, MiFID, and the financial crisis, most recently The Great Financial Plumbing: From Northern Rock to Banking Union (2015), alongside numerous op-eds and articles in CEPS publications and the international press. A member of the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee, he is a regular speaker at hearings for national and international institutions, including the European Commission and European Parliament, and at international conferences and executive learning courses. He served as an Independent Director of BME (Bolsas y Mercados Españolas), the listed company that operates the Spanish securities markets, from 2006 to 2018, and sits on a number of foundation boards and advisory councils. He holds an MA in Modern History from the University of Leuven (1985) and a postgraduate diploma in European Studies from the University of Nancy, France (1986).

Simona Leskovar

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Simona Leskovar

Simona Leskovar is a Slovenian career diplomat with nearly three decades of service, and since September 2024 the Programme Director of the Bled Strategic Forum. Until August 2024 she served as Ambassador of Slovenia to the United Kingdom and Permanent Representative to the International Maritime Organization, a posting for which she was named Diplomat of the Year from Europe 2024.

Over her career she has held many of Slovenian diplomacy's most senior roles, including State Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador to Japan and non-resident Ambassador to the Republic of Korea, and Deputy Permanent Representative at Slovenia's Mission to the UN in New York. Earlier postings took her to Washington, and she served as EU adviser to the Foreign Minister during Slovenia's first EU Council Presidency in 2008.

Alongside her diplomatic work, she has been Slovenia's national focal point for the Responsibility to Protect and director of the Young Bled Strategic Forum, and she founded the foreign ministry's "Young Ambassadors" programme, a mentoring initiative encouraging young women to pursue careers in diplomacy and international relations.

She studied international relations at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana and at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (Clingendael) in The Hague.

Jernej Pikalo

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Jernej Pikalo

Jernej Pikalo is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Ljubljana and one of Slovenia's prominent political figures. He twice served as Minister of Education, Science and Sport (2013–2014 and 2018–2020), was Deputy Prime Minister in the government of Marjan Šarec, and for many years was Deputy President of the Social Democrats. A scholar of globalisation, governance, and civic education, he earned his doctorate in political science at the University of Ljubljana and was a visiting researcher at the University of Warwick. He has held visiting professorships at the European Inter-University Centre in Venice and at Bifröst University in Iceland. Beyond academia and government, he has chaired the Programme Council of RTV Slovenia, served on the Council of the UNESCO International Bureau of Education, and sits on the Scientific Council of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS). He remains a frequent contributor to the Slovene media.

Charles Powell

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Charles Powell

Jaksa Puljiz

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Jaksa Puljiz

Jakša Puljiz is Head of the Department for European Policies at the Institute for Development and International Relations (IRMO) in Zagreb, a position he has held since 2017. His work focuses on the effects of individual European policies on the economic and social development of EU member states and of countries in the EU enlargement process. He joined IRMO in 2001, working in the Department of Resource Economics, Environmental Protection and Regional Development, where he concentrated on regional and local development with a particular focus on the European Union's Cohesion Policy. Over the course of his work at the Institute he has cooperated with numerous international organisations, including the World Bank, the European Commission, UNDP, and GIZ, on the implementation of a range of development projects and studies. As an expert, he has contributed to the drafting of numerous strategic documents and studies in the field of regional development and competitiveness. From 2012 to 2016 he served as Deputy Minister of Regional Development and EU Funds, after which he was appointed economic advisor to the Prime Minister of Croatia. He earned a postgraduate master's degree in Operational Research from the Faculty of Economics in Zagreb in 2005, and a doctorate from the Faculty of Economics in Split in 2009, with a dissertation on the factors of regional development and regional inequalities in Croatia.

Jochen Richter

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Jochen Richter

Jochen M. Richter is a lecturer and expert in EU affairs and global security, with over thirty years of professional experience inside European institutions. He held senior positions in the European Commission and the European Parliament - latterly as a Director - working on research policy, competition law, and the EU single market, as well as specialised areas such as trilogue negotiations and language policy. He also served in the cabinets of EU Commissioners Frits Bolkestein, as a cabinet member, and Leonard Orban, as deputy head of cabinet. Since retiring from the institutions, he has been engaged in academic teaching and policy analysis, lecturing on the functioning of the European institutions at universities in Luxembourg, Düsseldorf, and Lviv. Since 2024 he has taught in the certificate programme "European Integration" at the Ukrainian Catholic University. He is an Executive Member of the Diplomatic Council, a UN-recognised think tank, where he chairs the Global Security Forum. He is the author of Last Train West, published by Nomos Verlag, and contributed a chapter to Dr. Sophie Loussouarn's volume Brexit and its Aftermath.

Gregoire Roos

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Gregoire Roos

Grégoire Roos is the Director of the Europe and Russia-Eurasia programmes at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs). There he leads the institute's research and strategic partnerships on European industrial competitiveness, security and defence, and the wider implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. An expert in European policy and the geopolitics of energy, he previously spent four years as Head of Political Dialogue and Policy Innovation at the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, where he built the foundation's geopolitical practice at the intersection of international security, industrial policy, and the energy transition, and created its flagship annual programme at the Munich Security Conference. Earlier in his career he worked in the financial industry as a market intelligence officer and with the United Nations Development Programme at the UN Liaison Office in Dakar. He is a non-resident fellow at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy and is active across a number of international bodies, including the World Economic Forum's steering group on green trade and its High-Level Group on European Strategic Interdependence, the advisory committee of the Delphi Economic Forum, and the Trilateral Commission, where he is a David Rockefeller Fellow. In 2016 he received the annual prize of the Rencontres Économiques d'Aix-en-Provence, awarded by Emmanuel Macron.

Alexander Schallenberg

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Alexander Schallenberg

Alexander Schallenberg is an Austrian diplomat, jurist, and politician who currently serves as President of the Europe's Futures Initiative (EFI), a Vienna-based pan-European policy organisation launching in January 2026. He previously served as Austria's Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2019 to 2025 and, as a member of the Austrian People's Party, twice held the office of Chancellor of Austria; first from October to December 2021, and again in an acting capacity from January to March 2025. A career diplomat, he joined the Austrian foreign service in 1997 and headed the legal department at Austria's Permanent Representation to the EU in Brussels from 2000 to 2005. He later served as spokesman to the Foreign Minister, director of strategic foreign-policy planning from 2013, and head of the Foreign Ministry's European department from 2016. Widely regarded as a foreign-policy mentor within Austrian leadership, he was appointed Foreign Minister in 2019 and led Austrian diplomacy through successive coalition governments and the COVID-19 era. He is a recipient of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Principality of Liechtenstein and the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Since 2020 he has served as a trustee of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism. He studied law at the University of Vienna and the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas, and earned an LL.M. in European law at the College of Europe in Bruges.

Adriaan Schout

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Adriaan Schout

Adriaan Schout is Professor of European Public Administration at Radboud University in Nijmegen, and a Senior Research Fellow and Coordinator Europe at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (Clingendael). He combines research and consultancy on European governance for national and European institutions, with projects addressing the EU presidency, EU integration, and improving EU regulation. Before joining Clingendael, he served as an independent expert in EU governance for the European Economic and Social Committee (2006) and for the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research, supporting multilevel coordination questions in the drafting of the White Paper on the European Research Area (2007). He is also an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) at the University of East Anglia. He has (co-)authored numerous books and international articles, and won the UACES prize for Best Book in European Studies 2007 for The Coordination of the European Union: Exploring the Capacities of Networked Governance (Oxford University Press). His research interests include European integration, the euro crisis, European governance and better regulation, the EU presidency, EU agencies, and the Europeanization of national administrations. He holds a master's degree in economics from the University of Groningen and a PhD in political science from Leiden University.

Jiri Schneider

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Jiri Schneider

Jiří Schneider is a Czech former diplomat and, since 2021, Synodal Curator (lay moderator) of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, the highest lay office in the church. He served as First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic from 2010 to 2014. He entered public life after the democratic changes of 1989, serving as a member of the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly from 1990 to 1992. In 1993 he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he held a range of senior posts, including Director of the Policy Planning Department and, most prominently, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to Israel from 1995 to 1998. He has been closely involved in the development of think tanks and civil-society platforms in Central Europe, serving as Program Director of the Prague Security Studies Institute (2005–2010) and later as Executive Director of the Aspen Institute Central Europe in Prague (2016–2020). From 2000 to 2009 he also lectured on security studies, international relations, and public policy at Charles University in Prague, Masaryk University in Brno, and New York University in Prague. He studied geodesy and cartography at the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT) and earned a Diploma in Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge.

Mihai Sebe

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Mihai Sebe

Mihai Sebe, coordinator, European Institute of Romania & lecturer, University of Bucharest. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (French track) from the University of Bucharest, with research interests in European affairs, regional cooperation, the dynamics of European integration and the enlargement of the European Union . He is concerned with the shape of things to come.

Reka Szemerkenyi

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Reka Szemerkenyi

Ambassador Réka Szemerkényi is a Hungarian geopolitical expert specialising in transatlantic and energy security, with more than two decades of experience spanning government, think tanks, and the private sector. She is a member of the Energy Leadership Security Council of the European Initiative for Energy Security (EIES) and a non-resident Senior Advisor in Transatlantic Strategy at the International Republican Institute (IRI) in Washington, DC.

Her government career includes serving as Ambassador of Hungary to the United States (2015–17) and as National Security Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister of Hungary (2011–15 and 1998–2002). From 2017 to 2020 she was Executive Vice President of the Washington think tank CEPA (Center for European Policy Analysis), and earlier a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. In the private sector, she was Senior Advisor to the Chairman and CEO of Hungary's MOL Group (2006–11) and a consultant to the World Bank.

She is a board member of the Fulbright Association and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), and has lectured at the Catholic University of Milan and at the Pázmány and Károli universities in Budapest. Her honours include the Order of Merit of the French Republic and Poland's Bene Merito award, and she holds an honorary doctorate from Marymount University.

She earned her PhD (2006) at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, with a thesis on Cold War energy strategies, and holds master's degrees from SAIS, Johns Hopkins University (1995), the IEHEI in France (1991), and ELTE in Budapest (1990).

Velina Tchakarova

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Velina Tchakarova

Velina Tchakarova is a geopolitical strategist and founder of the consultancy FACE - For A Conscious Experience, through which she provides strategic foresight, scenario planning, and risk analysis to clients across the public and private sectors. With over two decades of experience in security, defence, and strategic foresight, her work focuses on great-power competition, the rise of middle powers, and the structural shifts reshaping the global order.

She previously served as Director of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy (AIES) in Vienna, one of Austria's leading independent research institutes on security and defence, and has lectured at Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Real-World Risk Institute. Her analysis appears frequently in Austrian and international media and at major conferences and panels.

Her current affiliations include the European Security Forum Network in Finland, the Scientific Advisory Board of the European Forum Alpbach, and the Paris-based geoeconomics think tank Eastern Circles. She holds a visiting fellowship at India's Observer Research Foundation and sits on the security policy advisory board of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Defence.

She studied macroeconomics and international relations at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia and holds an MA in political science and South Asian studies from Heidelberg University.

Symeon Tsomokos

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Symeon Tsomokos

Agnieszka Jaros

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Agnieszka Jaros

Agnieszka Jaros is an international executive with more than 20 years of experience in banking, strategy, transformation and organizational development across Europe.

Over the past decade, she has held Executive Committee and senior leadership positions within BNP Paribas Personal Finance, leading large-scale transformation, strategy, governance and performance improvement initiatives across several European markets. Previously, she held leadership positions in strategy, internal consulting and operations within BNP Paribas, as well as Citi, Société Générale and UniCredit.

Throughout her career, she has led transformation programs across Western, Central and Eastern Europe, working at the intersection of business performance, technology, governance and organizational change.

A graduate of the Warsaw School of Economics and HEC Paris, Agnieszka is particularly interested in the future competitiveness of Europe, the transformation of financial institutions, technological sovereignty, and the links between economic performance, innovation and social cohesion.

She is currently contributing to EuropaNova’s work on European competitiveness, growth, innovation and strategic autonomy.

Svitlana Kovalchuk

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Svitlana Kovalchuk

Svitlana Kovalchuk is the Executive Director of Yalta European Strategy (YES), Ukraine's leading international affairs platform. In this role she convenes global leaders from politics, business, and security to shape the international response to Ukraine and Europe's future.

For the past several years she has led the international work of YES and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, promoting Ukraine on the world stage through the YES Annual Meeting and Ukrainian events at gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Munich Security Conference. Earlier in her career she worked at GIZ (the German Corporation for International Cooperation) in Ukraine, helping to strengthen the institutional capacity of national and local authorities in delivering German government projects. She is also the author of several media publications on foreign policy.

A graduate of the Kyiv Institute of International Relations, she holds a doctorate in political science, with a thesis on military-political unions.

Wolfgang Pinner

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Wolfgang Pinner

Wolfgang Pinner is a German economist and European civil-society advocate, and a co-founder of the Europa Power Conference, the flagship annual event of the Paris-based think tank EuropaNova.

He serves on the board of the VDFG (Vereinigung Deutsch-Französischer Gesellschaften für Europa), the federation of Franco-German associations for Europe, and engages regularly in European public debate and citizen dialogue. On Europe Day, he represented EuropaNova at a citizens' dialogue in Bonn - organised with the VDFG, the Gustav-Stresemann-Institut, the Institut français Bonn, and the University of Bonn - speaking on European values, digital sovereignty, the economy, and the expectations of Generation Z.

Professionally, he spent his career in finance as a senior manager at financial institutions across Germany, France, and Luxembourg, including as a former COO at BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions. He now works as a freelance consultant and supervisory board member.

He studied at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

Olivier Vedrine

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Olivier Vedrine

Olivier Védrine is director of the Association Jean Monnet, professor at Dnipro University of Technology - National Technical University "Dniprovska Politekhnika”, journalist.
He is a regular contributor to LCI, BFMTV, Franceinfo TV and foreign TV channels, and writes in the Tribune de Genève since 2017.
He was the editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of the "Revue Défense Nationale" (2010-2014) in Paris at the École Militaire, he stopped the Russian edition of the "Revue Défense Nationale" at the beginning of 2014 to protest against the annexation of Crimea. Political adviser on Ukraine to Henri Malosse, President of the European Economic and Social Committee (2013-2015) in Brussels.
As a TV presenter in Ukraine, he has presented more than 150 TV programs on national TV channels in Ukraine, including his own political TV show in support of Ukraine and the European Union. He was editor-in-chief of Russian Monitor until February 2022, a Russian opposition Internet newspaper with 500,000 unique visitors per month before the large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Olivier Védrine was awarded the Order of Saint Vladimir by Patriarch Philarete, Patriarchate of Kiev, an order rarely awarded to a foreigner.
He was awarded the Academic Palms in 2022 in the presence of his Excellencies Etienne de Poncins - French Ambassador to Ukraine and Vadym Omelchenko - Ukrainian Ambassador to France.
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