Based in Brussels, Ilana Bet-El is a writer, historian and political analyst specialising in EU and international politics. Throughout the 1990s she worked with and for the UN both in New York and the Balkans, including a two and a half years period in Bosnia during and after the war. In 2002 she created the op-ed page of European Voice, a weekly paper that is part of the Economist group. She edited the page until December 2005, and now writes a regular column on defence and foreign affairs for the paper.