Dr. Ivana Karásková is a Special Advisor to the Vice-President of the European Commission and an EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency, Věra Jourová. She advises on Chinese interference in Europe for the draft of the Defense of Democracy package.

Apart from that, she is also a China Projects Lead at Association for International Affairs (AMO), a Prague-based think tank and a non-governmental organization. She founded and has been coordinating two international projects on China: MapInfluenCE which analyzes China and Russia’s influence in Central Europe, and China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe (CHOICE), a networking platform bringing together more than 100 China researchers from 30 different countries, analyzing China’s activities in Europe.

Since 2020, she has been a European China Policy Fellow at Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Germany. She is a Czech representative at China expert pool at the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) in Helsinki, Finland.

Ivana holds Ph.D. in International Relations and other university degrees in Journalism and Mass Communication, European Studies and International Relations. She completed research and study stays in China (Fudan University, East China Normal University), Taiwan (Chengchi University, Tamkang University) and the United States (Fulbright scholar at Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, New York). She is an alumna of International Visitors’ Leadership Program (IVLP) on investment screening and an alumna of German Marshall Fund 2023 Young Strategists Forum in Japan.

Ivana has testified at the European Parliament’s hearings on e.g. Chinese foreign policy, China’s influence in Europe and Sino-Russian confluence. She presented her research to Members of the German Parliament (Bundestag), Belgian Senate as well as for the Members of the US Congress.

She was quoted in e.g. The New York Times, BBC, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, South China Morning Post, Deutsche Welle, Le Monde, etc.