Analysing international policy processes and Lithuania’s role in them

Linas Kojala

Director
Biography

Linas Kojala is CEO of the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center and Associate Professor of Partnership at Vilnius University’s Institute of International Relations and Political Science. He is also a Millennium Fellow at the Atlantic Council and non-resident fellow at the Kennan Institute.

An internationally recognized voice on international affairs, his columns has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, CNN, FAZ, Foreign Policy, and other international media. He has moderated high-level discussions with heads of state and government, as well as international leaders including Alexander Stubb, Mark Rutte, Maia Sandu, Petr Pavel, and others. He was named a Munich Young Leader by the Munich Security Conference and the Körber Foundation, and has received DELFI’s Titanium Award as well as the Social Media Influencers’ Award for foreign policy commentary.

Kojala is consistently ranked among Lithuania’s three most influential public figures and placed second in 2025. He is the author of two books on European politics and U.S. foreign policy. He is also a recipient of the Finnish state decoration – Knight First Class of the Order of the Lion of Finland.

He holds a BA and MA in International Relations from Vilnius University, a Postgraduate Diploma in Global Business from Oxford University, and an MBA from the University of Cambridge. As a Fulbright Scholar, he was based at Harvard University.

Areas

01 Lithuania
02 European Union
03 NATO
04 United States of America

Publications by the author

More publications

Other analysts and experts

Edward Lucas Associate Expert

He is a former senior editor of the British weekly The Economist and is a non-resident senior analyst at CEPA.

Denis Cenusa Associate expert

Denis Cenusa is an Associated Expert with GSSC and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance in Florence. His doctoral research at Justus Liebig University in Giessen (Germany) focuses on EU governance and Russian hybrid energy warfare in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood. Over the past 15 years, he has published comparative, country- and region-focused analyses on European integration in post-Soviet space, EU–Russia competition, the geopolitics of critical infrastructure, hybrid warfare, and great-power competition, with a particular emphasis on the Black Sea region, as well as a research interest in the emergence of Global South regions, particularly China’s influence. He is fluent in English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Romanian.

Tomas Janeliūnas Senior Research Manager

Professor, Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University.

Maksimas Milta Associate Expert

Researcher at the ReThink.CEE programme of the German Marshall Fund in the USA and former Head of Communication and Development at the European Humanities University. His research focuses on Belarusian processes.