Stefanie Babst
NATO Acting Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy, NATO Headquarters, Brussels
Dr. Stefanie Babst has been NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy since May 2006. Before that, she was the Head of NATO's Country Section in the Public Diplomacy Division and a Lecturer of Russian and East European Studies at the Federal Armed Forces Command & General Staff College in Hamburg. She is also an active member of WIISS, Women in International Security Studies.
Amb. Jüri Luik
Permanent Representative of the Republic of Estonia to NATO, Brussels
In 1996 he became Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Republic of Estonia to the BENELUX countries and NATO. Since 1999 he was a member of Government of the Republic of Estonia, Minister of Defence and later Minister of Foreign Affairs. Later he served as an Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Republic of Estonia to Canada, United States and Mexico. Since 2007 he has been serving as the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Estonia to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
Amb. Adam Kobieracki
Director, Department of Security Policy, Ministry of Foreign Policy of the Republic of Poland; Former NATO Assistant Secretary General for Operations
Amb. Adam Kobieracki studied at the Warsaw University and later Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Soon after his studies in 1982 he worked at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He went through many departments and institutions at home and abroad where he gained vast experiences. He has focused on security policy and arms control issues. Since August 2008 he has been Director for Security Policy at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is participant in international seminars and workshops on security policy and arms control issues, inter alia at SIPRI, IISS, the Graduate Institute (Geneva).
Amb. Tacan Ildem
Director General for International Security Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkey, Ankara
In 1980, Mr. Ildem served in the Military service as Deputy Special Advisor for Foreign Policy to the Secretary-General of the National Security Council. In 1981 he became the Second and later First Secretary at the Turkish Delegation to the North Atlantic Council in Brussels. In 1989 he worked as the Political Counsellor at the Turkish Embassy in Washington D.C. In 2000 he became the Special Advisor to the Undersecretary of the MFA (briefly), then Chief of Cabinet and Principal Foreign Policy Advisor to the President of the Republic of Turkey.
Amb. (Ret.) Kurt Volker
Managing Director and Senior Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C.
Kurt Volker is a Senior Advisor to the International Security Program and member of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Advisors Group. He is a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Ambassador Volker is also Senior Fellow and Managing Director of the Center on Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Prior to joining SAIS, Ambassador Volker was a career member of the United States Senior Foreign Service, with over 23 years of experience working on European political and security issues under five U.S. Administrations. He served as Ambassador and the 19th U.S. Permanent Representative on the Council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from July 2, 2008 until May 17, 2009, leading the 156-person strong U.S. Mission to NATO. At NATO, Ambassador Volker straddled the transition covering the Bush and Obama Administrations, and oversaw U.S. preparations for NATO’s 60th Anniversary Summit, which took place in Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany on April 3-4, 2009.
