Luciana Alexandra Ghica is Associate Professor of International Relations and European Studies at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest (FSPUB), where she also acts as founding Director of the Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies (IDC), the leading Romanian research hub on international studies.
Ghica studied political science and international relations at the University of Bucharest, Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and University of Oxford, where she specialized in the analysis of international cooperation processes, with a focus on the institutional and discursive impact of democratization on foreign policy-making. She edited the first Romanian encyclopaedia of the European Union (c2005, 2nd ed. 2006, 3rd ed. 2007), co-edited the first Romanian handbook of security studies (2007; Book of the month distinction, Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and wrote a monograph on the relations between Romania and the European Union (2006), as well as several studies on foreign policy and international cooperation.
She is a recurrent guest lecturer of the Romanian Diplomatic Institute (Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs) for professional training on global and European international cooperation for development policies, EU institutions, and the analysis of diplomatic language. In addition, she has also coordinated the Romanian chapter of the prestigious series Kapuscinski Development Lectures (kapuscinskilectures.eu) since its first edition in 2009. Through this initiative developed by European universities jointly with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the European Commission, Ghica organized and moderated several live debates with global personalities in the field of development studies, including Paul Collier (University of Oxford), and the future head of state and UNDP Goodwill Ambassador HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway.
Since 2012 she serves as elected member of the boards of Research Committee 33 (The Study of Political Science as a Discipline) of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and of the European Confederation of Political Science Associations (ECPSA). Since 2015, she also serves as member of the international advisory board of International Studies Review (International Studies Association – ISA, isr.oxfordjournals.org).
Currently, within the research centre she coordinates, Ghica leads a publicly funded research grant aiming to produce the first world map of all emergent donors of Official Development Aid (ODA), with a focus on aid for democracy and democratic institutions capacity-building.
For her work and initiatives in international studies, the Romanian edition of Foreign Policy included her in the 2011 and 2015 annual lists of 101 Romanians who have something to say in matters of global politics, economy and ideas.
