Julia Vassileva

Dr. Julia Vassileva is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Her research lies at the intersection of international law and international security, focusing on how states use legal norms and institutions as instruments of strategy and statecraft in security competition. Her current second book project is on the use of non-legally binding international agreements in security politics. Her first book, The Strategic Life of Norms: Women, Peace Processes, and Power in the Post-Soviet Space, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Before coming to Belfer, Julia was a visiting scholar at Columbia University. She has also been a visiting researcher at the National University of Singapore’s Center for International Law, a visiting associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate Law School in Japan, a researcher at the UN’s International Law Commission in Geneva and New York, and an external legal expert at NATO’s Cyber Defense Center in Estonia. Prior to academia, she spent a year working for EU institutions in Brussels—at the European Commission and the EU’s diplomatic service (EEAS).

She holds degrees in Law and in International Relations from the University of Vienna (Mag.iur.), the University of Oxford (M.Phil.), the College of Europe (M.A.), and Tallinn University (Ph.D.).