Chair, New Diplomacy

NEW DIPLOMACY - placing strategic thinking and security at the heart of international relations. NEW DIPLOMACY was launched in 2015 to address the policy challenges facing global and regional policymakers in the eastern and southern neighbourhoods of the European Union, not least the insecurity in the post-Soviet space and the crises of democracy and instability in the Middle East.

In May 2016, New Diplomacy launched an Independent Journalism Fellowship for Eastern Partnership Countries, an initiative to raise standards of journalism covering the post-Soviet space, in particular the Eastern Partnership countries of Ukraine and Georgia. The programme included placements of journalists from Ukraine with ZDF public television and Spiegel Online in Germany, and another with Eastbook.eu in Poland. In all three of these cases, the journalists also wrote a range of stories, and contributed to other stories, for their host media and their home media back in Ukraine. A high-level media reforms roundtable was held in Kyiv, Ukraine, in July 2017 around the results of the fellowship programme.