8th Helsinki Summer Session: US and the Evolving International Order:

Benjamin Haddad is the director of the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council. He is an expert in European politics and transatlantic relations. Before moving to the Atlantic Council, he was a fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington DC. His work has notably advocated for transatlantic unity in the face of Russian aggression, greater European responsibility, and investment on strategic matters. His recent book “Paradise Lost: Europe in the World of Trump” makes the case for greater European unity in a world of new challenges and threats.

Dr Kristi Raik is the Director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute at the International Centre for Defence and Security since February 2018. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku. Dr Raik has previously served inter alia as a Senior Research Fellow and Acting Programme Director at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki; an official at the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union in Brussels; and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels and the International Centre for Policy Studies in Kyiv. She has a PhD from the University of Turku. She has published, lectured and commented widely on European foreign and security policy.

Dr. Daniel S. Hamilton is the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation Distinguished Fellow and Director of the Global Europe Program at the Wilson Center. He is a widely recognized expert on U.S. foreign policy and on European, Eurasian and transatlantic security, economic and political affairs. He is also Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins SAIS, where he co-leads the School’s postdoctoral program on “The United States, Europe, and World Order.” He was the Founding Director of the SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations, and for fifteen years served concurrently as Executive Director of the American Consortium for European Union Studies. He has held a variety of senior positions in the U.S. Department of State.

Niklas Helwig is a Leading Researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and an Associate Professor in International Relations at Tampere University. His research focuses on EU foreign and security policy, German foreign and security policy, as well as EU-US relations. He currently co-leads an Academy of Finland-funded project on “Transforming strategic cultures in contemporary Europe” (STRAX).

He worked at various think tanks in Europe and the US, including the RAND Corporation in Arlington VA, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin and the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. He was a DAAD Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington D.C. in 2018.

Helwig has published extensively in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS) and Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft. He served as special issue editor of German Politics and European Foreign Affairs Review. He has written policy analyses for government and non-profit organisations including the US Army and Air Force, the Finnish and German governments, and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. His journalistic articles appeared for example in Die Zeit, Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft, War on the Rocks and Euractiv.

Helwig completed his PhD on the transformation of European foreign and security policy after the Lisbon treaty at the Universities of Cologne and Edinburgh. He holds a master’s in economics from the University of Cologne.