Dr. Valbona Zeneli is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council with a dual affiliation at the Europe Center and at the Transatlantic Security Initiative of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. From 2011 to 2023, she served as a professor of national security studies and chair of strategic engagements at the U.S. Department of Defense’s George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.
Zeneli is also visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and a senior fellow in Peace, Security, and Defense at Friends of Europe in Brussels. She is also a course coordinator (contractor) of the Western Europe course at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State. Dr. Zeneli was a visiting scholar during 2023-2024 at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a Europe’s Future fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna during 2021-2022.
She specializes in transatlantic relations, globalization and international economy, strategic competition, NATO, European Union enlargement, and the Western Balkans. Zeneli is the 2023 winner of the Inspiration Award for Women.