Andrea Stanišić - Global Challenges Scholar
Andrea Stanišić is a 25-year-old Global Challenges scholar, coming from Montenegro, who is passionate about international cooperation and human rights. Aside from her mother tongue, Serbo-Croatian, she is fluent in English, has a good command of German, as well as basic communication skills in French, Slovenian and Russian.
Driven by her enthusiasm for multiculturalism and international education, she has participated in several international youth training programs abroad and went to three student exchanges. Owing to these experiences and volunteerism, she has had a chance to meet and work with people all over the globe, who have inspired her to cherish the values of proactivity, dedication, open-mindedness and diversity.
Educational and Career Background
Andrea has a Bachelor’s and Specialist’s degrees in International Relations from the University of Montenegro, as well as a Master’s degree in International Relations from the University of Ljubljana, all with an average grade excellent “A”. In 2017, she received the Academic Award for Excellence by the University of Montenegro. During her bachelor studies, she studied at the University of Ljubljana, as the recipient of the scholarship from the Centre of the Republic of Slovenia for Mobility and European Educational and Training Programmes in 2014, and at the University of Salzburg in 2015, as the Erasmus Mundus scholar. As part of her master’s studies, she was awarded an Erasmus+ scholarship in 2018 to conduct research at the University of Vienna.
In 2017, she worked as a Project Assistant at the think tank Centre for Democracy and Human Rights for 10 months. During her work, she was engaged in various projects, through the assistance in project writing, implementation of project activities, organisation of seminars and conferences, monthly reporting, administrative support, as well as proofreading and editing specific studies. Apart from that, she participated in numerous seminars on behalf of the organization, and worked on research assignments on various issues from the fields of the rule of law, human rights, social inclusion, Euro-Atlantic integration, security and defence.
Areas of Expertise
As part of the Global Challenges programme of the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law at Swansea University, Andrea has a research placement with environmental law charity ClientEarth. She is working on environmental human rights, with a focus on the right to clean/healthy air alone or as a component of the right to a healthy environment. More precisely, she is doing a comparative national law research of Western Balkan countries and the UK.
At the University of Ljubljana, Andrea graduated in January 2020 with the master’s thesis “Application of the universal norms at the regional level: a comparative study of the universal and European Union regimes for refugee protection”. The thesis is written in the light of rising concerns about the increasingly restrictive tendencies of the regime for refugee protection in the EU. It provides a comparative analysis of norms and other elements of the universal and EU regimes for refugee protection, with a particular reference to a number of elements that limit degree and quality of refugee protection in the EU, and thereby endanger the foundational norms.
At the University of Montenegro, she graduated in June 2017 with the specialist’s thesis "Foreign relations between the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations", focusing on the Common European Foreign and Security Policy in the context of EU-ASEAN relations.
Ambitions and Hopes for the Future
"After I finish the Global Challenges programme, I plan to work on programs and projects dedicated to protecting rights and building a better future in the field of environmental protection, migration or other areas of global concern. I believe that answers to global scale problems lay within mechanisms of interdisciplinary and intersectoral cooperation within and among local, national, regional, international and global levels, as well as in the strong commitment to expertise and evidence.
Therefore, my future engagement will be dedicated towards the work in international or regional institutions, international NGOs or private sector, on their human rights related missions. Through the work in an international organization, institution or business with a global influence, I would like to learn about innovative ways in which law and policy are utilised to address societal global challenges in practice. That would be an ideal opportunity for me to apply what I have learned at the Global Challenges programme, and at the same time contribute to international efforts in tackling urgent global issues."
