Bernhard Knoll-Tudor, PhD, serves as Deputy Dean and Director of Executive Education at the Hertie School. As a member of the School’s senior management team, he is responsible for strategic planning and priority setting for its executive track. This includes directing content development, budgets and allocating capacities to generate annual revenue exceeding €3m. Leading a growing team of currently 12 staff members, Bernhard initiates and develops School-wide strategic partnerships across various sectors and fosters relationships with governments, international organisations, consultancies, foundations, think tanks and NGOs. He conducts high-level courses on strategic communications and policy advocacy for senior government advisers from EU neighbourhood countries and designs trainings in the areas of digital transformation, good governance, global security and leadership in the public sector. As Adjunct faculty, he teaches skills courses as well as public international law at executive master’s level.
Before joining the Hertie School, Bernhard was the director of the Global Policy Academy at Central European University, Budapest (2012-18). He held positions at the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE), an international organisation devoted to “hard” security as well as to human rights diplomacy, where he served as special adviser / CdC to ODIHR’s director (Warsaw, 2006-12) and was involved in policy design, mission management and public relations on the level of field operations (BiH and Kosovo, 1999-2001). His prior experience spans positions at the European Union Monitoring Mission (Sarajevo), the United Nations Administration Mission in Kosovo (Prishtina) and at the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Prior to his career in international organisations, he worked at Foreign Policy (Washington, DC), DIE ZEIT (Hamburg) and the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), where he was awarded the highest prize in Austrian radio journalism (1992).
At the Hertie School, Bernhard has pioneered capacity- and alliance-building projects like Recharging Advocacy for Rights in Europe (fostering advocacy collaboration among leading human rights defenders on civic space within the EU) and STARLIGHT (equipping legal practitioners with skills to apply the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in strategic litigation), where he now chairs the projects’ boards. He designed and developed the Hertie PolAd certificate that enhances the capacity of government advisers. He also leads the Economic Connectivity Dialogues (to facilitate peacebuilding efforts between Armenia & Azerbaijan) and oversees the EU-funded Support to Human Rights in Georgia project.
Bernhard engages with Myanmar‘s National Unity Government and collaborates with organisations such as International IDEA (Stockholm), the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (Vienna), the LKY School of Public Policy (Singapore), LSE Cities (London) and KAPSARC (Riyadh). Together with his team, he secured project funding from USAID, the Council of Europe, World Bank, the EEAS, the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, GIZ, the Auswärtiges Amt, the EU Advisory Mission in Iraq, Egypt’s National Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, Oxfam, Instituto Republica (Rio de Janeiro), Open Society Foundations, the Eurasia Foundation, Stiftung Mercator and the National Endowment for Democracy, among others. He also mentors threatened scholars / Ukrainian refugee fellows at the Hertie School and has served as an expert witness in international arbitration proceedings involving investment in Kosovo.
Bernhard earned a master’s degree in law at the University of Vienna and an MA in international relations and economics from Johns Hopkins/SAIS with a focus on IR theory (Bologna and Washington, DC). He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute (Florence) and is the author of Legal Status of Territories Subject to Administration of International Organisations (Cambridge University Press, 2008). His latest (co-authored) work (“Cartel of Silence: How the European Union Undermines the Work of its Human Rights Defenders in the OSCE”) was published in the Journal of Human Rights Practice (OUP, 2023).
