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David Spence

David Spence

Biography

David Spence is currently a visiting fellow at the LSE European Institute and was previously David Davies Fellow in the LSE’s International Relations department. Formerly an EU diplomat, his last post was as minister counsellor in the EU delegation to the United Nations in Geneva. In 2006 he was special EU advisor to the UN Secretary-General’s Representative for the Elections in the Ivory Coast. Earlier he had been secretary of the European Commission task force for German unification,  head of training for the Commission’s External Service and advisor on European Security and Defence Policy and relations with NATO. Until his move to Geneva in 2003 he had also been Commission representative in the G8 and EU Council Terrorism Working Groups. Before his work for the European Commission David Spence was head of European Training at the UK Civil Service College and Conference adviser at the FCO’s Wilton Park Conference Centre. Earlier he was a lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the Sorbonne (Paris III). He holds a BA in International Relations from Sussex University, MAs in politics from Nice University and Sciences Po, Paris, and a B.Phil in Politics from Oxford (St. Antony’s College). He has published widely on European affairs. In addition to various articles on the Commission and the EU, on CFSP, and on effective multilateralism,  he is the co-editor with Prof. Brian Hocking of Foreign Ministries in the European Union: integrating diplomats, Palgrave, 2006. His The European Commission, Harper, 3rd edition 2006 is a standard reference work on the European Commission. His edited The EU and Terrorism, Harper, 2007 and The EU and Security Sector Reform, Harper, 2008 are the only books on their themes. Amongst his recent publications are ‘EU Governance and Global Governance’ in ‘Global Governance and Diplomacy: worlds apart’ published by Palgrave in 2008, and edited by A. Cooper, B.Hocking and W. Maley and in the December 2011 issue of the Hague Journal of Diplomacy “The Early Days of the European External Action Service: a practitioner’s view”. His latest book, on the European External Action Service, co-edited with Professor Jozef Batora, was published by Palgrave in August 2015. David Spence is fluent in French and German and has a minimal command of Spanish and Norwegian. He owned and managed two restaurants in London in the 1980s and had a short career in export marketing after gaining a diploma in business studies from the Bremen Chamber of Commerce in 1969.

All session by David Spence