Liridona Veliu Ashiku is the Program Manager for Research and Policy at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is a former Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and holds a PhD from Dublin City University. Her work bridges academic scholarship and public policy, contributing to debates on democracy, peacebuilding and foreign policy, with a focus on the Balkans and their Euro-Atlantic processes