Prof. dr. sc. Vesna Pusić; Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Croatia and a professor of Sociology of Politics at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb.

Born in Zagreb in 1953, she graduated sociology and philosophy in 1976 from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb. From 1976 to 1978 she was a researcher on the comparative study of industrial democracy in 12 countries at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana. She obtained a doctorate in sociology in 1984 at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, and in 1988 she became a full professor at the same faculty. In her university career she managed or participated in many research projects. In 1978, she coordinated the research project on the predominant political, religious, family and work-related values in Croatia that subsequently became part of a broader project titled New Agenda for New Democracy and from 1989 to 1991 she conducted research into the management styles of 18 most successful organizations in Croatia. As a university lecturer she gave lectures in a number of academic and scientific institutions, such as the American University, Washington, D.C., the Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., the Sloan School of Management, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, the Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y, the Wilson Centre, Washington D.C., the Foreign Service Institute, the State Department etc.

Vesna Pusić was one of the 28 founding members of the Croatian People's Party – liberal democrats (Hrvatska narodna stranka, HNS) in 1990, holding the position of the Party president between 2000 and 2008. She served three consecutive terms as MP, having been elected to the Croatian Parliament in the 2000, 2003, and 2007 elections. Between 2003 and 2007 she held the position of the Deputy Speaker of the Parliament and from 2008 till 2011 of the Chairperson of the HNS-HSU parliamentary group and the Chairperson of the National Committee for Monitoring the Accession Negotiations between Croatia and the EU. Since 2006 she is the Vice-president of the European Liberal Democratic and Reform Party (ELDR), now in her 3rd term.

Mrs. Pusić is also a founder and former director of Erasmus Gilda, non-governmental, non-partisan project for the promotion of cultural democracy, within which the periodical Erasmus, mostly focusing on various aspects of transition in Croatia and other East-European countries, was published. Within the Erasmus Gilda, where she was active until 1998, she organized many panel discussions and debates on controversial issues in the region with the aim to encourage civil initiative in conflict resolution and find alternative political solutions in this area.

She is the author of three university textbooks, Democracies and Dictatorships (Novi Liber, 1998), Rulers and Administrators (Novi Liber, 1992) and Industrial Democracy and Civil Society (Sociological Association of Croatia, 1986) and co-author of Industrial Democracy in Europe and European Industrial Relations (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981). She published more than fifty scientific articles in Croatian and international periodicals.