Dr Rosa Balfour is the director of Carnegie Europe. Her fields of expertise include European politics, institutions, and foreign and security policy. Her current research focuses on the relationship between domestic politics and Europe’s global role.
She is the author of books, research-based articles, and opinion pieces in the international press on issues relating to European politics and international relations. Balfour is also an advisor to Women in International Security Brussels (WIIS-Brussels), an associate fellow at LSE IDEAS, an alumna of the Europe’s Futures program at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. In 2024 she was appointed to the Scientific Advisory Council of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Since 2021, she is an honorary patron of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES).
Prior to joining Carnegie Europe, Balfour was a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She was also director of the Europe in the World program at the European Policy Centre in Brussels and has worked as a researcher in Rome and London.
Dr Balfour holds an MA in history from Cambridge University, an MSc in European Studies and PhD in International Relations both from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
In recent years, trade wars, geopolitical competition, and the weaponization of interdependence have emerged as threats to Europe’s economic security. To boost its resilience and strengthen its strategic autonomy, the EU has started to infuse its economic policies with geopolitical considerations.
In response to great-power rivalry and the weaponization of interdependence, the EU has adopted a geopolitical approach to economic statecraft. To build resilience and maintain its international credibility, the union will have to balance its pursuit of economic security with broader foreign policy goals.
Europe is so caught between technocracy and politics that it may be unable to address the monumental list of challenges it faces.
Amid a political shift to the right and a growing focus on defending the union, Europe seems to be turning its gaze inward, risking irrelevance to the rest of the world.
EU enlargement is an opportunity to expand the single market and consolidate new investments that will benefit the whole of Europe.
EU foreign policy has always been more about ambition than reality. But today’s spiraling disunity among the bloc’s members makes even that ambition an aspiration of the past.
Carnegie Politika podcast host Alex Gabuev is joined by Carnegie Europe's director Rosa Balfour and senior fellow Tom de Waal to discuss Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, and Serbia, which find themselves caught between Russia and the EU.
Making sense of the parliamentary election outcomes and how they might impact issues such as climate.
Rosa Balfour joins Sophia to discuss the recent 2024 European Parliamentary elections—the outcomes, what they mean for future EU policy, and why the US should care.
As its citizens head to the polls in June’s European Parliament elections, the EU faces an unprecedented combination of external threats. The incoming cohort of EU leaders will need to make bold decisions that bolster the union’s geopolitical power and render it a stronger global actor.
