Francesca Ghiretti is a Research Assistant at the Centre of Grand Strategy in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, where her research focuses on economic security and geoeconomics. She received her PhD from War Studies, King’s College London where she was awarded the Leverhulme Scholarship as part of the project ‘Interrogating Visions of a Post-Western World: Interdisciplinary and Interregional Perspectives on the Future in a Changing International Order’. Her thesis ‘The securitization of Chinese foreign direct investments in the EU’ explored how an economic means becomes a security issue as received the Outstanding Thesis Award.

Francesca worked as analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) where she covered economic security, the Belt and Road Initiaitive, EU-China relations and UK-China relations. She spent a semester as Visiting Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Affairs (ECFR). Before joining MERICS, she worked as a Research Fellow Asia at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) in Rome leading a project on the Belt and Road Initiative in Italy. Francesca also worked as a geopolitical analyst for CQS, a London-based hedge fund and as assistant to Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, former Secretary General of NATO.

Research Interests

• Economic security
• Geoeconomics
• EU- China
• Foreign direct investments
• Securitization
• UK-China
• Italy-China

Publications

• Ghiretti, F. (2023). Screening FDI in the EU: A Cornerstone of an Economic Security Agenda. In: Springer Studies in Law & Geoeconomics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/17280_2023_2
• Gallelli, B., Ghiretti, F. (2023). The Belt and Road initiative in Italy. Lausanne, Switzerland: Peter Lang Verlag. 10.3726/b20683
• Supply Chain Resilience: China's Search for Vertical Integration. Institute Montaigne, 03/10/2023
• Construire la sécurité économique de l’Europe, Le Grand Continent, 14/06/2023
• How China imposes sanctions. A guide to the evolution of Beijing’s new policy tool. MERICS, 06/06/2023
• From opportunity to risk: The changing economic security policies vis-à-vis China. MERICS, 23/02/2023
• ‘COSCO’S HAMBURG TERMINAL ACQUISITION: LESSONS FOR EUROPE’, War on the Rocks, 28/11/2022
• ‘“With a little help from my friends”: China turns to Africa to bolster food security’, MERICS, 07/10/2022
• ‘Dependence in Europe’s Relations with China’, Editor, ETNC Report, April 2022
• ‘Italy's embrace of the Belt and Road Initiative: populist foreign policy and political marketing’, International Affairs, Volume 98, Issue 3, May 2022, Pages 1033–1051
• ‘Italy and the Comprehensive Agreement on Investments: disappointment over the process’ Asia Europe Journal, 20, pages39–46 (2022), 25/07/2021