United Kingdom

Gesine Weber is a fellow on GMF’s Geostrategy team, where she works on European security and defense issues. Based in Paris, she focuses on EU defense initiatives, security and defense policy of the E3 (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom), and Europe's role in the global order. 

During a 2024 fellowship at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, Weber led a research project on European balancing in the Indo-Pacific in the context of US-China competition. 

Prior to joining GMF, she worked as a defense policy adviser at the German parliament and as a consultant for the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation in Shanghai. Weber is pursuing a PhD in defense studies at King’s College London, where she is part of the European Foreign Policy Research Group and contributes to the work of the Centre for Grand Strategy. She is an associate researcher for the European Council on Foreign Relations and a nonresident Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for International Security.

Weber holds a master’s degree in European affairs from Sciences Po in Paris and another master’s degree in political science from the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied Mandarin at the Beijing Foreign Studies University. Her writing and commentary appears regularly in English, French, and German in European and other international media, including the BBC, the Neue Züercher Zeitung, Politico, and France 24. 

Georgina Wright is a special adviser to the president and senior fellow at GMF, specializing in France, the United Kingdom and the EU. She has over a decade of experience analyzing European policy, advising governments, and shaping high-level discussions on UK-EU relations, EU foreign policy and competitiveness, and transatlantic relations.

Before joining GMF, Wright was deputy director for international studies at Institut Montaigne, a French think tank, where she led research on EU foreign policy and economic security. She previously held positions at the Institute for Government, Chatham House, the European Commission, and NATO. Wright is a member of several expert committees for national governments and has testified before the US Congress and parliaments across Europe.

She studied politics at the University of Edinburgh and holds a master’s degree in EU international relations and diplomacy studies from the College of Europe (Bruges). She speaks fluent French, Italian, and English.