Ioannis Armakolas is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics of South East Europe at the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki), Senior Researcher at the newly-formed European Union Knowledge Hub on Prevention of Radicalisation and Senior Research Fellow & Head of the South-East Europe Programme at the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), the foremost foreign policy think tank in Greece; he’s also a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence. Professor Armakolas is a member of the Europe’s Futures network of the Erste Foundation (Vienna), member of the Independent Tripartite High Level Group on EU Neighbourhood Interdependencies (Brussels) and Editor of the book series ‘Southeast European and Black Sea Series’, published by Taylor & Francis publishers. He serves as a pro bono member of the Working Group for the formation of the Bilateral Youth Cooperation Office between Greece and North Macedonia, on the basis of the Prespa Agreement that solved the so-called ‘name dispute’.

His previous affiliations include: Europe’s Futures Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Editor in Chief of ‘Southeast European and Black Sea Studies’ (Routledge journals, Taylor & Francis); ESRC Fellow at the Department of Politics, University of Oxford; Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford; Director of Research at the ʽUS-Greece Task Force: Transforming the Balkansʼ (joint project of the Hellenic Centre for European Studies and the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies); Region Head for South East Europe at Oxford Analytica; Tip OʼNeill Fellow in Peace and Conflict Studies at INCORE-Northern Ireland (Ulster University & United Nations University). Professor Armakolas has extensive experience as a consultant with European Commission, USAID, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK’s Department for International Development, Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Open Society Foundations projects in the Western Balkans and with companies, such as KPMG Consulting Inc., BearingPoint, Coffey International, and TSGN.

Professor Armakolas holds a Doctorate with a focus on ethnic conflict and security from the University of Cambridge and a MA in International Relations from the University of Kent at Canterbury.