Dr. Jens Hillebrand Pohl is a legal scholar and geoeconomic strategist whose ideas on economic lawfare, geolegal power, and the power–utility synthesis have helped catalyze a new discourse on global economic governance. His work examines how legal and regulatory architectures are deployed not only to manage economic flows, but to assert strategic control and reconfigure the distribution of global power.
He is the founding Director of the Helsinki Geoeconomics School and Secretary-General of the Helsinki Geoeconomics Society—together comprising the Helsinki Geoeconomics consortium, a platform dedicated to advancing education, research, and convening at the intersection of law, capital, and strategy. He is also the Editorial Director of the Helsinki Geoeconomics Monitor, a current affairs periodical focused on the geoeconomics of finance, strategy, law, and technology; Chair of the Helsinki Initiative on Law & Geoeconomics; and Series Editor-in-Chief of Springer Studies in Law & Geoeconomics.
Prior to founding Helsinki Geoeconomics, Dr. Pohl served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, where he contributed to national-level research on geoeconomic investment risk, economic security, and international governance. He taught international economic law and supervised graduate research at Maastricht University, lectured on global governance at United Nations University–MERIT, and held visiting research appointments at the World Trade Institute, the Max Planck Institute for Procedural Law, and other leading institutions.
Earlier in his career, he practiced law before U.S. federal courts and the European Court of Justice, advising on cross-border restructuring, institutional design, and regulatory strategy. His legal work included roles at Paul, Weiss LLP in New York and the European Stability Mechanism in Luxembourg.
Dr. Pohl holds degrees from Harvard Law School, Maastricht University, and the Stockholm School of Economics, and is admitted to practice in New York, England and Wales, and Ireland.
