Areas of Expertise

• German, French, and European foreign and security policy
• Geoeconomic diplomacy
• Sanctions, economic statecraft and coercion, stabilization
• Danish/Nordic-German relations

Languages

Danish, German, English, French

Dr. Kim B. Olsen has been a research fellow at DGAP since September 2023. Before that, he was an analyst with the Danish Institute for International Studies and an associate fellow at DGAP. Having worked in diplomacy and international affairs for more than ten years, Olsen has served as a senior foreign policy and stabilization advisor to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin, Paris, Istanbul, and New York and as the head of the Danish Cooperation Office in Tunis.

Olsen is author of the recent book The Geoeconomic Diplomacy of European Sanctions (BRILL) and was part of the expert group “Diplomacy in the 21st Century” at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). He has worked for the Center for German and European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Centre for Advanced Security Theory at the University of Copenhagen.

Olsen holds a PhD from the department of political science at the University of Antwerp, where he focused on the intersections of geoeconomics, sanctions, and European diplomacy. Previously, he studied international relations and international political economy at Freie Universität Berlin; University of California, Berkeley; and University of Copenhagen, from where he graduated in 2012.

[Last updated: September 2023]