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Network participant

Nicholas Dungan

CEO CogitoPraxis, former President French-American Foundation, Adjunct Professor SciencesPo, Associate Fellow Chatham House

Nicholas Dungan is CEO and founder of CogitoPraxis. He has advised CEOs, chairpersons, board directors, business owners, entrepreneurs, senior executives, government leaders and emerging talents on impact, professional leadership, strategic foresight, thought leadership, stakeholder relations, corporate citizenship and strategies of influence across a broad range of organisations drawn from industry, finance, government, not-for-profit and professional services.

Nicholas Dungan is a Senior Network Member of the European Leadership Network, was previously president and chief executive of the French-American Foundation in New York and, in an earlier career, was a senior investment banker in London, New York and Paris at Merrill Lynch and Société Générale, among others. His investment banking focus was client relationship management, mergers and acquisitions, bespoke structured finance and strategic advice.

He has been a Professor of Practice at the French Institute of Political Studies (SciencesPo Paris), where he created and taught a seminar leadership course ‘Strategies of Influence’ as well as an international relations seminar course on ‘The Changing Role of Non-State Actors in International Affairs’. He also created and taught courses entitled ‘Why France Matters’ and ‘Macron’.

Nicholas Dungan is the author of Gallatin: America’s Swiss Founding Father, published by New York University Press. He is a contributor to International Affairs and The World Today, both publications of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London (Chatham House).

He has been an Associate Fellow of Chatham House, was a director of the Chatham House Foundation and is currently a member of the International Advisory Board of International Affairs, the scholarly journal of Chatham House. He has been a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council in Washington DC as well as a Senior Research Fellow of the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques in Paris (IRIS). Nicholas Dungan has also served as a member of the board of directors of SciencesPo Alumni USA and the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce New York Chapter.

He has been published and quoted by the BBC, Bloomberg, CNN, The Economist, the Financial Times, La Croix, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Les Echos, L’Express, Le Temps, Libé, L’Obs, the New York Times, SwissInfo and the Washington Post, among many others. He appears regularly on Bloomberg Television and France24 and has participated in broadcasts for the BBC, BFM, CNews, Europe1, France Culture, Radio Classique, RTL, Radio Télévision Suisse / Swiss Broadcasting Corporation and others.

He is a graduate of Stanford University and SciencesPo Paris.

Content by Nicholas Dungan

Commentary

Europe needs 360º resilience and the private sector is key

The recent UK Strategic Defence Review and the French National Strategic Review both stress the importance of the readiness of European countries to withstand and recover from a wide variety of threats. ELN network member Nicholas Dungan writes that business leaders need to seize the initiative and assume their own responsibility for the implementation of a whole-of-society comprehensive security model across the European continent, together with their political and military counterparts.

2 September 2025 | Nicholas Dungan
Commentary

Network reflections: U.S.-Russia Summit

Trump and Putin are due to meet on Friday to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. In light of the EU leaders’ statement of 12 August that any deal must respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and involve Kyiv, we asked ELN network members what can and what should European governments do to ensure that Washington and Russia act upon those principles? How can the EU influence the outcome of the bilateral talks, sustain transatlantic unity, and prepare for different possible outcomes?

Commentary

A tale of two summits

Around the political NATO Summit in the Hague last week, with its limited ambition to make Donald Trump happy again, a less visible and much more productive summit occurred, writes ELN Senior Network Member Nicholas Dungan. Concentrating on what Europe needs to do to increase European deterrence, efficiency, and resilience, it produced sound thinking and actionable proposals.

1 July 2025 | Nicholas Dungan