Dr. Cinzia Bianco is a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, where she works on political, security and economic developments in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf region and relations with Europe. She also wrote extensively about Europe-Gulf relations in the domains of energy and climate security. 

 

Previously, she was a senior analyst at Gulf State Analytics, where she has done consultancy and advisory work for European and US stakeholders since 2015, and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. Between 2013 and 2014, Dr. Bianco was a research fellow for the European Commission’s project on EU-GCC relations ‘Sharaka’. 

 

She holds an MA degree in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King’s College London and a PhD in Middle East Politics from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, where she worked on threat perceptions in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) after the 2011 Arab uprisings. She is the co-author with Prof. Matteo Legrenzi of “Le monarchie arabe del Golfo: Nuovo centro di gravità in Medio Oriente” (Il Mulino, 2023) and the sole author of “The Gulf monarchies after the Arab Spring: Threats and Security” (Manchester University Press, forthcoming)