Ilana Bet-El is an historian, writer and political analyst. Based in Brussels, she focuses on EU, Russian and Transatlantic affairs, and more broadly on international politics and institutions. Since 2000 she has worked on strategic policy issues with governments, NGOs and corporations. Throughout the 1990s she worked with and for the UN as a political analyst, both in New York and the Balkans, including two and a half years in Bosnia during and after the war. Ilana Bet-El holds a PhD in history and literature from the University of London, and has subsequently focused on a number of issues related to war, peacekeeping and conflict situations. As an historian, her core interest is in war and memory, including the absence of British conscripts from the memory of the Great War, the uses and abuses of memory in the modern Balkan wars, and the EU as an instrument for circumventing memory.

Ilana Bet-El’s first book was Conscripts: Lost Legions of the Great War (1999). She has also co-authored two books with General Sir Rupert Smith: The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (2005; published under the name of General Smith), and more recently Le Grand Désenchantement - Vivre À L'ère De L'insécurité (2012). She has contributed editorials and comments to the Guardian, Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal Europe.