Gesine Weber

Dr. Gesine Weber is a Senior Researcher in the Global Security team at the Center for Security Studies (CSS). Her research interests include European security and defense in the context of global powershifts, grand strategy, the global order, and Europe–China relations.

Before joining the CSS, Gesine was a Research Fellow at the Paris office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), a transatlantic think tank, where she worked primarily on European security and defense, the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), and Europe’s role as a geopolitical actor. In 2024, she spent six months as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Arnold A. Saltzman Institute in New York, conducting research on European balancing in the Indo-Pacific with a Fulbright-Schuman scholarship. Previously, she worked as a Research Consultant for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Shanghai and as policy advisor focusing on defense policy in the German Bundestag. She has also been an Associate Researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the Centre for Grand Strategy at King’s College London, as well as a Non-Resident Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for International Security.

Gesine regularly advises government bodies and international organizations in Europe and the United States and publishes and comments in European and international media, including Le Monde, Deutsche Welle, War on the Rocks, BBC, and NZZ, as well as on her Substack newsletter Geopolitical Europe. In 2024, her commitment to translating academic research into policy practice and public debate was recognized with the Research Impact Prize of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College London.

Gesine holds a PhD in Defence Studies from King’s College London, master’s degrees from Sciences Po Paris and Freie Universität Berlin, and a bachelor’s degree from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. She also studied with a DAAD scholarship in a postgraduate programme at Beijing Foreign Studies University and speaks German, English, French, and Mandarin.