Michal Kořan
I see Aspen Institute not only as a platform but also as an irreplaceable intersection of views, ideas, enterprises, people and communities – now encompassing the whole of Central Europe. This is why I believe Aspen is a unique place to pursue efforts to help to reverse the trend of creating defensive mental and physical barriers and to make best of the technological and social changes that we are witnessing nowadays.
Michal Kořan is the President of the Board of the Global Arena Research Institute and the former Deputy Director of the Aspen Institute Central Europe. Until June 2017, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of International Relations based in Prague (Czech Republic) where he previously acted as a Deputy Director (2013 – 2016) and a Head of Research (2009 – 2013). He is also an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Masaryk University in Brno, where he received his Ph.D. in 2008. In 2012 he was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at the Harvard University.
In his academic life, he has been focused on foreign policy analysis of the Central European countries, Visegrad cooperation, security and Trans-Atlantic Relations. Recently, he also focuses on the interlinkage between globalization, technological changes and democracy. In total, he was responsible for (or cooperating on) almost twenty research grants and other projects. Since 2007, he is the lead-author of an annual analytical book Czech foreign policy: Analysis. He has devoted a significant part of his professional career to providing opportunities and platforms for a dialogue among different sectors of the public. In 2008, he founded an annual International Symposium Czech Foreign Policy, he is a co-founder and coordinator of the Czech-Polish Analytical Platform, in 2013 – 2014 he was a vice-chairman of the Programme Council of the Czech-Polish Forum. He is a co-founder and the national co-coordinator of the Think Visegrad Platform. Michal has delivered numerous invited speeches, including Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Wilson Centre, University of Pennsylvania, Polish Institute of International Affairs, the Diplomatic Academy in Wien or the European Economic Forum in Katowice.