9th Annual Helsinki Summer Session: A new age of Nordic and Baltic Sea security?

Nathalie Tocci is Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali, Honorary Professor at the University of Tübingen and Pierre Keller Visiting Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. She has been Special Advisor to EU High Representative and Vice President of the Commission Josep Borrell. As Special Advisor to HRVP Federica Mogherini she wrote the European Global Strategy and worked on its implementation. She has been a member of Eni’s Board of Directors since May 2020. Previously she held research positions at the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels, the Transatlantic Academy, Washington and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence. Her research interests include European foreign policy, conflict resolution, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Her major publications include: Framing the EU’s Global Strategy, Springer-Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 (author); The EU, Promoting Regional Integration, and Conflict Resolution, Springer-Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 (co-editor); Turkey and the European Union, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 (co-author); Multilateralism in the 21st Century, Routledge, 2013 (co-editor), Turkey’s European Future: Behind the Scenes of America’s Influence on EU-Turkey Relations, New York University Press, 2011 (author); and The EU and Conflict Resolution, Routledge, 2007 (author). She is the 2008 winner of the Anna Lindh award for the study of European Foreign Polic

An expert in the history of international relations, Mary Elise Sarotte is the inaugural holder of the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professorship of Historical Studies. She is also a research associate at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. Sarotte earned her AB in History and Science at Harvard and her PhD in History at Yale University. She is the author or editor of six books, including The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, both of which were selected as Financial Times Books of the Year, among other distinctions and awards. Following graduate school, Sarotte served as a White House Fellow, then joined the faculty of the University of Cambridge, where she received tenure before accepting an offer to return to the United States to teach at USC. Sarotte is a former Humboldt Scholar, a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her most recent book is Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, on what the fight over NATO expansion did to Western relations with Russia.

Ville Sinkkonen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA), Center on US Politics and Power. His research focuses on US foreign policy, hegemony, normative power and the politics of trust in international relations. Sinkkonen is the author of “A Comparative Appraisal of Normative Power” (Brill, 2015) and his work has been published in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies and European Review of International Studies, among others. He holds a doctoral degree (LL.D.) from the University of Turku.

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.