Gerald Knaus

Speaker at the St. Gallen Symposium

Gerald Knaus is the founding chairman of the European Stability Initiative (ESI), a Berlin-based think tank working on democracy, migration, human rights, and European stability. He was closely involved in shaping the EU-Turkey Statement on Migration (2016), a landmark in European migration policy, and his work at ESI also helped uncover the “Caviar Diplomacy” corruption scandal at the Council of Europe in 2017. Alongside his role at ESI, he is a regular lecturer on Southeast Europe at the NATO Defence College in Rome and has held fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His books include Can Intervention Work? (2011, with Rory Stewart), the Spiegel bestseller Welche Grenzen brauchen wir? (2020), Wir und die Flüchtlinge (2022), and most recently Welches Europa brauchen wir? (2025, with Francesca Knaus) on Europe’s future and the challenge of defending democracy against authoritarian threats. Born in Austria in 1970, he studied in Oxford, Brussels, and Bologna, and lives in Berlin.