Kaija Schilde

Kaija E. Schilde is a Global Fellow with the Wilson Center's Global Europe Program. Professor Schilde is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and a faculty affiliate of the Political Science Department at Boston University. Her research and teaching focuses on the political economy of security, with a particular emphasis on defense industry politics and the political development of the European Union. In July 2021 she was named Acting Director of BU’s Center for the Study of Europe and in January 2022 she received the Jean Monnet Chair in European Security and Defense.

At Boston University, she is the co-director of the Pardee School Project on the Political Economy of Security and the Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking (FMHT). She serves on the Executive Board of the Center for the Study of Europe and the Steering Committee for Innovate@BU and co-directs the co-curricular Human Security Co-Lab, a policy innovation lab between the Pardee School FMHT and BU Spark at the Hariri Institute for Computing.

Professor Schilde received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of expertise include the European Union, European foreign and security policy, comparative politics, defense acquisition and technology, bureaucracy and interest groups, as well as computational modeling and simulation.