Dario Cristiani is a nonresident senior fellow with the North Africa Program at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East programs. An Italian scholar on Mediterranean affairs, he is also a visiting senior researcher at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at King’s College London, where he received his PhD in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies in 2015, with a dissertation on the EU’s foreign policy in the Mediterranean. He is also a research associate at the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome.

From 2019 to 2025, he was a senior resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund, where he led the work on Italian foreign policy. From 2022 to 2024, he taught courses on Southern Europe at the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State. Previously, he has held academic and research positions at the International Centre for Policing and Security at the University of South Wales, the Belgian Royal Military Academy, the School of International Training, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Fatih University, and the University of Naples. He has written extensively on Mediterranean, Maghrebi, and Middle Eastern affairs; Italian foreign policy; international relations and global geopolitics; terrorism and jihadism; and political risk.

In addition to his policy and academic work, he has over two decades of experience as a political and economic risk analyst, contributing to companies such as Dun & Bradstreet, IHS Markit, Oxford Analytica, Risk Advisory, and others. He has lived and worked in Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, Tunisia, Turkey, and Belgium.