Francesca Ghiretti

Adjunct Fellow (Non-resident), Wadhwani AI Center
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Francesca Ghiretti

Francesca Ghiretti is an expert in economic security, China’s foreign policy, and EU-China relations. She is host of the podcast Geoeconomic Competition and senior geoeconomic analyst at Adarga, a London-based AI company. Previously, Francesca worked as analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), Europe’s largest think tank on China, where she covered economic security, the Belt and Road Initiative, and EU-China relations. She spent a semester as a visiting fellow with the Asia Programme of the European Council on Foreign Affairs (ECFR). Before joining MERICS, she worked as a research fellow for Asia at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) in Rome, where she led a project on the Belt and Road Initiative in Italy. Francesca also worked as a geopolitical analyst for CQS, a London-based hedge fund, and as an assistant to Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, former secretary general of NATO. She received her PhD from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where she was awarded a Leverhulme scholarship as part of the project "Interrogating Visions of a Post-Western World: Interdisciplinary and Interregional Perspectives on the Future in a Changing International Order." Her thesis, "The securitization of Chinese foreign direct investments in the EU," explored how an economic means becomes a security issue and received the Outstanding Thesis Award. Dr. Ghiretti’s writing and commentary have appeared in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Politico.