Executive Director
Mr. Mentor Vrajolli is the recently appointed Executive Director of Kosovar Centre for Security Studies (KCSS) a position which started to exercise from January 2019. Before this, from 2011 Mr Vrajolli held the position of Senior Research and Secretary of KCSS. While, his association with KCSS started back in 2008 when he joined KCSS as a Researcher.
For more than a decade long engagement in the research at KCSS (first as Researcher and then as Senior Researcher) Mr. Vrajolli have been involved in a significant number of projects, playing a crucial role on their implementation. The projects that Mr. Vrajolli has been involved were of the various geographic scopes which included domestic, regional (Western Balkans) and broader area.
Since 2009, Mr. Vrajolli have been engaged as researcher in the regional think-tanks consortium “Civil Society Capacity Building in Mapping and Monitoring the Security Sector Reform in the Western Balkans". Since 2011 Mr. Vrajolli has represented the KCSS in the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) a Brussels based European think tank and NGO network. In 2012, he has also been a coordinator and later the methodologist of the Kosovo Security Barometer Programme of KCSS. From 2016 Mr. Vrajolli has been engaged in different Horizon 2020 Consortiums in which KCSS have member, which includes projects such as: Peacetraining.Eu (Led by SYNYO, Austria) and EUNPACK.Eu (Led by NUPI, Norway).
Likewise, in 2018 he represented KCSS also in the Resolve Network which is a network established under the umbrella of US Institute for Peace which gathers world-wide regional and global institutes specialized in the area of countering and prevention of violent extremism.
Hence, as a result of engagement in numerous research based and advocacy platforms, Mr. Vrajolli have become an author of significant number of research works launched within frame of KCSS projects as well as outside. Many of his publications have found space in journals with regional and wider audience (for more details find the list of KCSS publications).
On the other hand, Mr. Vrajolli’s important role at KCSS can be viewed also from the managerial point of view. As the Secretary, he held the second most important managerial position at our think tank which’s responsivities among others included: leading the fundraising, developing internal structures of our organization, adapting internal statutory regulations, participating and leading on behalf of KCSS the negotiations with different internal and external contractual subjects as well as requiring accountability to the other senior staff regarding the implementation of the project activities.
Finally, alongside with his primary engagement at KCSS, Mr. Vrajolli occasionally is engaged as a consultant in the various projects implemented by domestic and also international organizations. Mr. Vrajolli have legal study background whereas the areas in which he has been engaged in the policy oriented research includes: security sector reform, integrity in the security and defense sector, regional cooperation in the security sector, gender and minority inclusion in the security sector, rule of law enforcement; post-conflict issues and state-building as well as on the resilience building, prevention and countering the violent extremism.
