Guest Lectures

It is a tradition at the School to invite a practitioner from the Brussels community each week, at lunchtime, to give a Guest Seminar. These Seminars are an integral part of the programme and are attended by staff, MA students, and Doctoral candidates. We feel this is of crucial importance for the students, for several reasons. Events of international significance occur throughout the academic year that could not possibly have been anticipated in advance to include in the teaching curriculum, and the Guest Seminars is the forum in which these are included. A range of different politicians, diplomats, journalists and others, are able to discuss in depth a wide range of specialist issues, and it is often the case that practitioners will illuminate issues with much greater clarity than the media. Finally, the insights of practitioners often help staff to illuminate for students the more generalisable features of international relations embedded within current events.

The most recent past speakers have included the following people, to whom the School is most grateful:

  • Jaap de Hoop Scheffer (Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
  • Dr Michael Leigh (Director-General for Enlargement)
  • Lord Hannay of Chiswick, (former British Ambassador to the UN and the EU)
  • Dr Robert Cooper, (Director General, General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union)
  • General Sir Mike Jackson, (former Head of the British Army)
  • Edward Mortimer, (former Director of Communications in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations)
  • Professor Petros Mavroidis, (Columbia Law School)
  • Dr Heather Grabbe, (Director, Open Society Institute - Brussels)
  • Jeremy Kinsman (Canadian Ambassador to the EU)
  • Ambassador Sune Danielsson, (Head of Secretariat for the Wassenaar Arrangement)
  • Immanuel Wallerstein (Senior Research Scholar, Yale University)
  • Gareth Evans (President of the International Crisis Group)
  • Senator Alain Destexhe (Vice President of the Committee on Foreign Affairs)
  • Judith Kumin (Representative of the UNHCR in Brussels)
  • Aidan White (Secretary General of the International Federation of Journalists)
  • Professor Rey Koslowski (Associate Professor of Political Science, The Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany)
  • David Earnshaw (Managing Director of Burson-Marsteller)
  • Gunnar Wiegand (Head of the Unit for Relations with the United States and Canada in the European Commission)
  • John Koenig (US Deputy Permanent Representative to NATO)
  • Dr Peter Witt (German Deputy Permanent Representative to the EU)
  • Karl von Wogau MEP (German MEP for Baden-Wurttemberg)
  • Dr Tuomas Forsberg (Department of Political Science in the University of Helsinki)
  • Jo Wood (Director of European Government Affairs and Public Policy with Glaxo Smith Kline)
  • Dr Nadia Milanova (Programme Director, Human Rights without Frontiers)
  • Dr Tazeen Murshid (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
  • Nicholas Watt (European Editor of The Guardian)
  • Avi Schneebalg (Attorney and Mediator)
  • John Palmer (Political Director of the European Policy Centre)
  • Susan Pond (Head of NATO's Partnership for Peace and Cooperation Programmes)
  • Alessandro Rossi (European Co-ordinator of Non-Violence Peace Force)
  • Andrew Bradley (Assistant Secretary General Political Affairs and. Human Development of the ACP Group of States)