Marlene Spoerri
Marlene Spoerri is a political scientist working on democracy promotion, youth movements, nationalism, and transitional justice. Having lived and worked throughout the Western Balkans, her research explores how US and European aid agencies influence efforts to build democracy and deal with the past in post-conflict and newly democratic states. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, declassified government documents, and thousands of pages of donor reports, she shows how external actors both help and hurt fledgling democratic processes, as well as the methods by which they can begin to do better.
In 2012, Marlene received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam. She is currently serving as Program Officer for Ethics Matter at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and is the author of the forthcoming manuscript, Engineering Revolution? Building Parties and Bringing Down Dictators in the former Yugoslavia. Her publications have been featured in peer-reviewed journals like Democratization, Europe-Asia Studies, and the Journal for International Relations and Development, as well as in media outlets like the Christian Science Monitor and The Montreal Review.
In 2005, Marlene graduated cum laude from the University of Amsterdam with a Masters Degree in International Relations, having minored in Women’s Studies. Since then, she has sought to combine scholarly research with a focus on policy application. She has therefore worked for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Open Society institute, US Embassy in Zagreb, Independent Diplomat, and the Humanitarian Law Center. Among her many affiliations, Marlene has served as a Visiting Scholar at Central European University’s Department of Political Science and Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellow at Columbia University and a Research Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has received grants and awards from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, as well as the EU’s Socrates/Erasmus program.
