Senior Fellow
Dr. Willem Theo Oosterveld is a non-resident senior fellow at HCSS. His areas of expertise include the politics of the Middle East, conflict analysis and peacebuilding, as well as law and development. He holds degrees in political science, international law, and history, having studied in Amsterdam, Leiden, Paris and New York, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. A former Fulbright scholar, he earned a PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.
Willem has experience in academia, government, journalism and business. From 2013-2018, he was a strategic analyst at HCSS, where he directed and contributed to a host of projects, including on the rise and fall of ISIS, trends in development aid, geopolitical foresight as well as the impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the Middle East and the Caribbean. Before joining HCSS, he worked for an economic intelligence company in Johannesburg, Jakarta and Casablanca. In Geneva, he worked for the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) and with the Dutch Mission to the UN. In New York, he interned with the Security Council Secretariat at UN headquarters.
Over the years, he has contributed to various international media outlets, including The Economist and the Financial Times. He also published a monograph, The Law of Nations in Early American Foreign Policy (Boston: Brill, 2015). Willem speaks English, French, Dutch and German fluently. He also has knowledge of Spanish and Italian, and is working on Arabic.
