Gerald Knaus

Founding Chairman European Stability Initiative's (ESI)
Gerald Knaus (credit: Francesco Scarpa) | Speaker at SILBERSALZ 2021
Gerald Knaus (credit: Francesco Scarpa) | Speaker at SILBERSALZ 2021

Gerald Knaus (Austria) is the European Stability Initiative's (ESI) founding chairman. After studying in Oxford, Brussels and Bologna, he taught university economics in Ukraine and spent ten years working for NGOs and international organisations in Bosnia and Kosovo. He published extensively on the refugee crisis in the Aegean and the Central Mediterranean as well as on corruption in the Council of Europe. In 2011, he wrote the book “Can Intervention Work?”.

He is a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and was for five years an Associate Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

In 2018/2019 he was a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. In 2020 he published the SPIEGEL bestseller "Welche Grenzen brauchen wir?" ("What Borders Do We Need?") on the future of asylum and migration policy. He writes the blog www.rumeliobserver.eu.