Prof. Dr. Heinrich Kreft is a Mercator-IPC Senior Fellow. For the last four years, until August 2024, he held the Chair for Diplomacy and was the Program Director of International Relations and European Studies at Andrássy University Budapest and Director of its Center for Diplomacy.

Previously, he was Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (July 2016–August 2020), Special Ambassador for Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue and for International Academic Relations, and Deputy Head of the Policy Planning Staff of the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin. Other assignments in his 40-year diplomatic career have taken him to Washington, DC, Tokyo, Madrid, and La Paz.

He has been a visiting fellow at the Henry L Stimson Center, the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institutions, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, DC.

Heinrich Kreft studied political science, modern history, and sociology at Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA (USA), at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris and the Institut des Hautes Etudes de L’Amérique Latine of the Sorbonne Nouvelle, and at Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster. He has published extensively on international relations. His most recent publications focus on China, the broader Middle East, Hungary and Central Europe, and on the Western Balkans.