Washington, DC

Andrew Small is a Berlin-based senior transatlantic fellow with GMF's Indo-Pacific program. He returned to GMF after a period of leave in 2023-2024 to work as the first China fellow at IDEA, the advisory hub that reports to the European Commission president. He is the author of “The Rupture”, also titled “No Limits”, about the transformation of European and American policy toward China. It was named one of the Financial Times’ 2022 Politics Books of the Year. He also wrote, in 2015, “The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics”. His articles and papers have been published in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and many other journals, magazines, and newspapers.

Small was based in GMF’s Brussels office for five years and the Washington, DC office for ten years, and has worked as a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and in the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He has provided congressional testimony on several occasions, including to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Small was educated at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Emiliano Alessandri is a visiting senior fellow at GMF. He is also a senior adviser with the Agency for Peace Building and an associate fellow with the Middle East Institute. His expertise is in the field of international security and multilateral cooperation with a particular focus on transatlantic relations, European affairs, and the Mediterranean/Middle East North Africa.

Alessandri was a resident senior transatlantic fellow with GMF between 2010 and 2013, working primarily on Mediterranean affairs and Türkiye. He subsequently served three successive secretary generals of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe as a senior officer between 2013 and 2023. He also held positions with the International Center for Migration Policy Development, the Brookings Institution, and the Institute of International Affairs of Rome, and taught at the College of Europe and Central European University.

Alessandri holds a PhD in international history from the University of Cambridge and a master’s degree in international economics and US foreign policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). 

Bret Schafer is a senior fellow, Media and Digital Disinformation, for the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Bret is the creator and manager of Hamilton 2.0, an online open-source dashboard tracking the outputs of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state media outlets, diplomats, and government officials. As an expert in computational propaganda, state-backed information operations, and tech regulation, he has spoken at conferences around the globe and advised numerous governments and international organizations. His research has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and he has been interviewed on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the BBC. Prior to joining GMF, he spent more than ten years in the television and film industry, including stints at Cartoon Network and as a freelance writer for Warner Brothers. He also worked in Budapest as a radio host and in Berlin as a semi-professional baseball player in Germany’s Bundesliga. He has a BS in communications with a major in radio/television/film from Northwestern University, and a master’s in public diplomacy from the University of Southern California, where he was the editor-in-chief of Public Diplomacy Magazine.