Stefan Lehne is currently Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe (the Brussels office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) and lecturer at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna.

Following a career as an Austrian diplomat focused on multilateral diplomacy and on EU integration he joined the Policy Unit of the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU and later became director for the Balkans and Eastern Europe in this institution. During these years he worked closely with High Representative Javier Solana on crisis-management in the Western Balkans. Inter alia he acted as the EU’s representative in the Kosovo Status process. In 2008, he returned to Vienna to become director general for political affairs in the Austrian Foreign Ministry.