Valbona Zeneli is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center and at the Transatlantic Security Initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. She is also a visiting scholar for 2023–2024 at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. From 2011 to 2023, she served as professor of national security studies and chair of strategic engagements at the US Department of Defense’s George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, where she continues her affiliation as a visiting adjunct professor. Zeneli is also a visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
She specializes in transatlantic relations, strategic competition, NATO, globalization and the international economy, EU enlargement, and the Western Balkans. Zeneli has published numerous papers and book chapters and is a frequent contributor to leading international magazines. She has delivered more than one hundred presentations in over thirty countries, including as a frequent lecturer and visiting professor at the NATO School in Oberammergau, the US Foreign Service Institute, the US Department of State, and defense academies across Europe. Zeneli was a nonresident visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in 2021–2022 as a Europe’s Future fellow, focusing her research on Chinese influence in the Balkans.
Zeneli received her PhD in political economy from the University of Bari and a BS with honors in business administration from the University of Bologna, Italy. She also completed graduate studies in international marketing as a fellow in the Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University, as well as executive education for senior executives in national and international security at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. In addition to English, she speaks Italian, German, and some Spanish. Zeneli is the 2023 winner of the Inspiration Award for Women.
