Roland Freudenstein

Roland Freudenstein was born in 1960 in Bonn, Germany. After a two year voluntary military service, he studied political science, economics, Japan studies and international relations in Bonn and Los Angeles. Having worked as a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, he became a member of the foreign and security planning staff of the European Commission in Brussels in the 1990s. In 1995, he took over the Warsaw office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and later held a leading function in the research branch of the Foundation’s central office in Berlin. After coming back to Brussels in 2004, he represented the German city state of Hamburg to the European Union. From 2008 to 2021, he was Policy Director of the Brussels based Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies, the think tank of the European People's Party. From 2021 to early 2024, he was Vice President of GLOBSEC, Central Europe's biggest think tank headquartered in Bratislava, and Head of GLOBSEC Brussels. He then created the Brussels Freedom Hub website and worked for one year as the Brussels Office Director of Free Russia Foundation. He has contributed to debates and published extensively on European integration, international security, German-Polish relations and the global solidarity of democrats against increasingly aggressive autocracies.