Europe’s Futures Fellows 2020/2021
rope, where he focuses on Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe. He is also a lecturer at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. He is the author of Turkey under Erdogan (Yale University Press, 2022) and co-editor of Russia Rising: Putin’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomsbury, 2021), and contributes frequently to major news outlets. Ioannis Armakolas is a politics professor, thinktank actor and top Greek expert on South- Eastern Europe. During his fellowship, Ioannis undertook the first comprehensive analysis of the Prespa Agreement, which settled the so- called Macedonia name dispute. The analysis aims to understand the dynamics of settlement of the Greece-North Macedonia dispute and to draw lessons for the EU about the nature of Balkan disputes, their potential for settlement as well as the role European diplomacy and influence can play in near future. Ioannis is tenured Assistant Professor in Comparative Politics of Southeast Europe at the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy and leads its Southeast E urope Programme. Ioannis is the editor-in-chief of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.
Srđjan Cvijić is a prominent human rights expert and academic focusing on the Western Balkans. Srđjan’s engagement as Europe’s Futures Fellow was focused on the example of the democratic transition of Serbia from toppling Milošević in 2000 until the Covid-19 pandemic – demonstrating how the inability of the post-authoritarian governments to build a relationship of confidence with the citizens had a detrimental impact on the success of Serbia’s democratic experiment. Srđjan is a Senior Policy Analyst in the Open Society European Policy Institute in Brussels. He leads the Open Society Foundation’s advocacy in Europe on several foreign policy portfolios, including EU enlargement, Western Balkans, Turkey and North Africa. He has published extensively, in both academic and policy format, on EU foreign relations and the politics of the Balkans.
Dimitar Bechev is among leading European experts on Turkey’s and Russia’s influence in Europe and the Mediterranean. As a Europe’s Futures Fellow, Dimitar explored the international politics of Europe’s periphery, where states and elites (of candidate countries) have been objects of actors higher in the international hierarchy (EU, US, Russia, Turkey, etc.), but have also been adept at manipulating power dynamics to their advantage. Dimitar is a visiting scholar at Carnegie Eu89
