About me
After four years in New York City and six in Sarajevo, and a two-year interlude in Germany, I now live in Brussels, the capital of Europe (and of Belgium!). A political scientist by training, I have been working for over three years as an editor for the Southeast Europe section of Transitions Online, the leading newsweekly covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union, and as a freelance writer and editor.
If you’re interested in my writing, please go to the Articles page.
After a first degree in philosophy from the University of Zürich (1995) I received a master’s degree in comparative politics (1998) from the New School for Social Research in New York City. After finishing my coursework and passing my doctoral exam, I went off to write my dissertation on external state-building, analyzing why ten years of peace implementation in Bosnia have failed to create a proper state. Not surprisingly, spending time in a real job out there in the real world concinved me that academic work wasn’t for me (and also healed me from the illusion that a real job was what I was after).
I’m a 2003 Mellon fellow in security and humanitarian action.
For the past five years I’ve been helping non-profit organizations — ranging from the UNDP and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation to the European Center for Minority Issues — give shape to their ideas in the form of grant applications, progress reports, evaluations, or research.
Before that, I spent four years (1998-2002) on the staff of the International Rescue Committee in Vienna, New York, and Sarajevo; in my last job there, I oversaw the Design, Monitoring and Evaluation Unit of a 20-million-dollar program in Bosnia.
Even earlier I’d worked for the Open Society Institute in New York (1997-98) and, at a time when glue and a typometer were the editor’s main tools, I was a staff assistant at a now defunct daily newspaper in my hometown (1987-95).
