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Julia-Silvana Hofstetter is a political scientist and expert on emerging technologies and their impact on international peace and security. She currently serves as a Senior Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, where she teaches capacity-building courses for representatives from governments and international organizations on digital disinformation and hate speech in armed conflict and gendered perspectives on cybersecurity.

She is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the AI Security Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and a member of Chatham House’s Advisory Group on Gender and Cybersecurity. Julia-Silvana was a Women in International Security (WIIS) Global NextGen Fellow in 2021, researching data weaponization in Afghanistan, and an AI for Peace Fellow at Swissnex San Francisco in 2023. She previously worked for the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich, the Geneva Center for Security Policy (GCSP), the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, and various academic institutions. Julia-Silvana is also President of WIIS Switzerland and Co-Founder of the UNIDIR-WIIS CoLab Geneva, which aims to bring a gender perspective to multilateral disarmament.

Julia-Silvana has published widely on human rights-based cybersecurity, digital peacebuilding, humanitarian data governance, and postcolonial feminist perspectives on technology governance. Most recently she developed a typology of gendered impacts of data weaponization for Oxford University Press and analyzed gendered cyberharms of geolocation data for Chatham House.

As an independent consultant, she previously advised organizations such as the ICRC, NATO, and the US Department of State on issues of international security and emerging technologies. Julia-Silvana has also been regularly invited to present her research at academic conferences, including conferences organized by Cambridge University’s Business and Human Rights Journal (BHRJ) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Julia-Silvana holds a Master’s in International Relations and Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) Geneva, a Bachelor’s in Political Science from the University of Zurich, and a post-graduate certificate in International Conflict Management from the International Peace and Security Institute and Johns Hopkins University. As a Harvard Carr Center Technology and Human Rights Fellow, Julia-Silvana will cast a feminist perspective on surveillance capitalism and epistemic violence in digital democracy.