Ambassador Anna Ifkovits Horner is a Government Fellow within the Global Fellowship Initiative of the GCSP. She has over 20 years of experience in diplomacy and international affairs, having held various positions within the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA)), the Swiss Defence Ministry and the United Nations. Most recently, from 2019 until December 2022, Ms. Ifkovits Horner served as Director for Eurasia at the FDFA and was responsible for Swiss bilateral relations with the countries from South-Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as for Council of Europe and OSCE affairs. Previously, she was in charge of relations with the neighbouring countries of Switzerland. Earlier in her career, she served at the Swiss permanent mission in Vienna as a team leader for the Swiss Chairmanship of the OSCE (2013-2015), at the Swiss Embassy in Austria (2008-2012), and in the Human Security Division in Bern, working on multilateral peace policy issues (2006-2008). In 2005, she was seconded to the Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport as diplomatic adviser to the President of the Swiss Confederation. At the beginning of her career, Ms. Ifkovits Horner worked at the Swiss mission to the EU in Brussels, at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in Bern and with the United Nations World Food Programme in Yemen. Ms. Ifkovits Horner has expertise in complex negotiation processes and has represented Switzerland in numerous multilateral conferences. Her fields of expertise include European security and European affairs, OSCE, human rights, peace policy, development aid, Swiss-EU relations.
Ambassador Ifkovits Horner holds a Bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Geneva and a Master's degree in International Relations from the Ortega y Gasset University Research Institute at the Complutense University of Madrid. She speaks French, German, English and Spanish, with an intermediate command of Italian.