Jan Melissen

Jan Melissen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Clingendael Institute and Senior Fellow International Relations and Diplomacy at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University, where he teaches in the MSc International Relations and Diplomacy (MIRD), and Professor of Diplomacy at the University of Antwerp. 

Jan is a non-resident Fellow with the Centre on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and the Charhar Institute in Beijing. He taught at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, and he was a visiting scholar at China’s Foreign Affairs University and the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP). Jan is founding Co-Editor of The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and Editor of the Diplomatic Studies Book Series with Brill Nijhoff. 

Before joining the Clingendael Institute, Jan was Director of the Centre for the Study of Diplomacy at the University of Leicester (UK). At Clingendael he held various management positions (2001-12). He has written research reports on diplomacy for several governments and he lectured in many countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. He is currently involved in multiple projects on change and innovation in diplomacy (see LinkedIn for details).

Jan Melissen co-authored two major Clingendael reports: Futures for Diplomacy (2012) and Diplomacy in the Digital Age (July 2015). After 2015 results of his Clingendael projects were published in international journals like European Foreign Affairs Review (2016), Global Affairs (2016), Global Policy (2017, 2018), and The Hague Journal of Diplomacy (2018). His two most recent co-edited books are Rethinking International Institutions (2016) and Understanding Public Diplomacy in East Asia (2015).

He graduated in Politics and International Relations at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) in 1988. In 1993 he was awarded a PhD in Law from Groningen University (the Netherlands).