Julia Vassileva

Julia Vassileva is currently a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University's Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4) for the 2024-2025 Academic Year.

She is a researcher and lecturer in International law and Security studies at the School of Governance, Law and Society at Tallinn University, Estonia, where she is finalizing her PhD. At Columbia's AC4, she is continuing her independent research on women's leadership and empowerment in peace negotiations in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, focusing on wars/conflicts in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, and Ukraine. She builds on extensive data she collected while working as a lecturer and researcher at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs in Tbilisi, the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy/ADA University in Baku, the Armenian State University of Economics in Yerevan, and the Moldovan Platform for Security and Defence Initiatives in Chisinau.  

Julia holds an MPhil in International Relations from the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford, a Magister iuris Law degree from the University of Vienna, and an MA in EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies from the Collège d'Europe in Bruges. She has worked for the EU Commission, the EU’s Diplomatic Service (EEAS), and with various NATO centers. Just before arriving in New York, she was a researcher at the UN’s International Law Commission in Geneva, and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Graduate Law School of Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan. 

Her work is published in diverse international journals, among them Oxford University Press' Journal of Global Security Studies and the Journal of Law and Politics (『法学雑誌』) in Japan. 

A native speaker of German and Bulgarian, and fluent in English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Italian, Julia would be happy to connect to discuss her research in any of the aforementioned languages.