Expert Profile

Dr Carsten Wieland is an Associate Fellow within the Global Fellowship Initiative of the GCSP. Carsten Wieland is a German diplomat, senior UN consultant, Middle East and conflict expert with high-ranking track-1 mediation experience. He has served with three UN Special Envoys for Syria as Senior Expert for Intra-Syrian Talks and political advisor. He has also worked on political responses to the Syrian conflict for the German Foreign Office. In his diplomatic capacity he was also Director of the German Information Center for the Arab World in Cairo working on public policy responses to the migration crisis. Currently, he works as Senior Middle East Advisor for the Green Party Parliamentary Group in the German Bundestag. Wieland is also a lecturer at New York University (NYU) Berlin, Associate Fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), guest professor at the University Rosario in Bogotá, and previously a fellow at the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA. He worked also as director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) in Colombia. A journalist by training, he reported from the United States, the Middle East and Latin America as a foreign correspondent for the German Press Agency (DPA). His academic publications include Syria and the Neutrality Trap: Dilemmas of Delivering Humanitarian Aid to Violent Regimes (2021), Syria: A Decade of Lost Chances (2012), Syria at Bay: Secularism, Islamism, and “Pax Americana” (2006) and Nation-state by Accident: The Politicization of Ethnic Groups and the Ethnicization of Politics, Bosnia, India, Pakistan (2006). Wieland studied history, political science and philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin, Duke University in North Carolina and at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.