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 initiativessecurity 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. 

Jörg Forbrig is managing director for the Transatlantic Trusts, GMF’s long-term programming to assist civil society and bolster democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Based in GMF’s Berlin office, he leads the “Engaging Central Europe” program, the Fund for Belarus Democracy, and the “Ukraine: Resilience and Recovery” initiative. He also works closely with the Balkan Trust for Democracy and the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation.  

Forbrig’s analytical and policy work focuses on the eastern-most member countries of the European Union and NATO, the EU's eastern and southeastern neighborhoods, and Russia. He has been published widely on democracy, civil society, and Central and Eastern European affairs, and is the author of Reclaiming Democracy (2007), Prospects for Democracy in Belarus (2006), and Revisiting Youth Political Participation (2005). He is also a regular contributor to major international media.