Former Deputy NATO Senior Civilian Representative in Afghanistan Mark Jacobson, former EU special representative for the South Caucasus Peter Semneby, and former Washington Post national writer Laura Blumenfeld have joined the German Marshall Fund of the United States as senior fellows, the Fund said on its website.
Peter Semneby joins GMF’s Brussels office as a senior fellow to work on issues related to the Black Sea region, the South Caucasus, and Russia. Semneby served as EU special representative for the South Caucasus from 2006 to 2011, concentrating on the protracted conflicts, political reform, human rights issues, and crisis management. Previously, he was head of the Mission to Croatia for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) between 2002 and 2005, and head of the OSCE Mission to Latvia between 2000 and 2002. In Croatia, Semneby and his staff assisted the country in post-conflict rehabilitation and reconciliation. His work in Latvia focused on citizenship and language issues. He is currently on leave from the Swedish Foreign Service. While in the Swedish Foreign Ministry, he was responsible for European security and defense policy and also served in the Swedish embassies in Germany, Ukraine, and the USSR.
Semneby was educated at the Stockholm School of Economics, the University of Uppsala, the University of Stockholm, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Apart from his native Swedish, he speaks English, Russian, German, and French, and has a working knowledge of Croatian and Serbian.
