Biography

Francesco Giumelli is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Department of International Relations and International Organization (IRIO) of the University of Groningen. He is Director of the research theme Development, Security and Justice under the Agricola School for Sustainable Development at the University of Groningen. Since 2022, Francesco has also been Chair of the COST Action Globalization, Illicit Trade, Sustainability and Security (GLITSS), a network of 300 members from 45 countries that fosters a common dialogue across disciplines on illicit trade matters. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development (JIED) and of the Central European Journal of International Security Studies (CEJISS). His research is also featured in the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). He served as Deputy Head of Department in Groningen from 2017 to 2023 and co-coordinated the BA programme in International Relations and International Organization from 2014 to 2017.

Before joining Groningen as Assistant Professor in 2013, Francesco was Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations and European Studies at Metropolitan University Prague (MUP) from 2008 to 2013. For five years, he taught courses on the European Union, Terrorism, International Organizations, and International Relations Theories. In Prague, he was also a member of the Center for Security Studies (C4SS) at MUP.

He graduated in Political Science from the University of Bologna and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science/International Relations from the Institute for Humanities and the Social Sciences (formerly the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane) at the University of Florence. His doctoral thesis focused on international sanctions imposed by international organizations and was shortlisted for the Jean Blondel Prize in 2010, awarded annually for the best thesis in politics (broadly defined to include International Relations, Political Theory, and Public Administration) nominated by a full member institution of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).

In 2011, he published Coercing, Constraining and Signalling: Explaining UN and EU Sanctions after the End of the Cold War with ECPR Press. In 2013, he published his second book, The Success of Sanctions: Lessons Learned from the EU Experience, with Routledge (previously Ashgate). He published his first monograph in Italian, Le sanzioni internazionali, with Il Mulino in 2023.

Francesco was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in 2010/2011 and a Visiting Researcher at the Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro in 2012.

During his Ph.D. studies, he was a visiting student at MIT and later a visiting fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Since 2007, he has been a member of the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (TSC), a group of more than forty scholars and policy practitioners worldwide coordinated by Prof. Thomas Biersteker and Hon. Sue Eckert on the effectiveness of UN targeted sanctions regimes. He was also a fellow in the European Foreign Policy and Security Policy Studies (EFSPS) programme, funded by Compagnia di San Paolo, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and the VolkswagenStiftung foundation, where he worked on a project examining EU sanctions effectiveness.