Areas of Expertise

Transatlantic relations
Strategic competition
Geoeconomics
European Union integration
NATO

Short Bio

Dr. Valbona Zeneli has been an associate fellow at DGAP since June 2025. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States, affiliated with both the Europe Center and the Transatlantic Security Initiative of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. In addition, she serves as a senior advisor at AVM in Milan; a visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute in Florence; and a senior fellow for peace, security, and defense at Friends of Europe in Brussels.

From 2011 to 2023, Zeneli was a 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. She continues to be a visiting professor there. She is a frequent lecturer at NATO School Oberammergau and the US Foreign Service Institute. She works as a GDRP consultant for the US Department of State.

In 2023–2024, Zeneli was a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and, in 2021–2022, a Europe’s Future Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. In 2023, she received the Inspiration for Women Award.