Dr. habil. Cornelius Friesendorf is the Coordinator of the OSCE Network (2018-2020) and Head of CORE. He is a political scientist who joined the IFSH in March 2018. Previous positions include working as senior advisor for an EU police reform project in Myanmar, research associate at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, fellow at the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, and project officer for the Center for Security Studies, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

He received his habilitation from Goethe University Frankfurt with a study on military intervention (How Western Soldiers Fight: Organizational Routines in Multinational Missions, Cambridge University Press, 2018) and his doctorate from the University of Zurich with a thesis on counter-narcotics strategies (US Foreign Policy and the War on Drugs: Displacing the Cocaine and Heroin Industry, Routledge, 2007). He also studied at the Free University of Berlin (Diploma in Political Science), the London School of Economics and Political Science (Master of Science in European Studies), and in Bristol and Göttingen.

His academic research and policy work covers a variety of issues, including the institutional development of the OSCE, foreign security assistance to post-Soviet states, police reform, strategies against human trafficking and drug trafficking, and military doctrines. He speaks German, English, French, and Russian.  

Frank Evers is the Deputy Head of the Centre for OSCE Research (CORE). In the mid-1990s, he was one of the first economic advisers in one of the then-newly established OSCE field operations and, after that, Deputy Head of the OSCE Mission to Ukraine. Later on, he served in the OSCE Office in Yerevan were he was one of the creators of the very first Århus Centre – the first of its kind in today’s OSCE-supported network of about 50 Århus Centres. In his current capacity at CORE, he had a leading role in the collective work of designing and establishing the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. He is responsible at CORE for political consultancy as well as capacity-building projects, such as induction courses for incoming OSCE chairmanships.

Frank Evers is an expert on OSCE conflict management in a broadest sense. Regionally, he concentrates mainly on the three East Slavic countries and the South Caucasus. He studied telecommunications, East-European studies and economics in Russia and Germany. He graduated from the East-European Institute of the Free University of Berlin, where he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on aspects of Russia’s economic transition.

He speaks German, English and Russian.