Rate My Professor Tena Prelec

Dr Tena Prelec is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. She serves as Assistant Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Rijeka’s Centre for Advanced Studies on South Eastern Europe. Her academic background includes a PhD from the Centre for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex. She previously held positions as Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and Research Associate at the London School of Economics.

Dr Prelec’s research centres on transnational linkages in corruption studies, the political economy of transition, and the intersection of illicit finance and geopolitics, with a particular emphasis on EU enlargement and kleptocracy in South Eastern Europe. She is Work Package leader of the Horizon Europe project GEO-POWER-EU and Principal Investigator of the GI-ACE project on lawyers as gatekeepers or enablers. She is a member of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group and a Marshall Memorial Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. She is also a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex. In 2022, she was part of the team that received the Fair, Just and Inclusive Society Award from the University of Exeter’s Knowledge Exchange Awards. Dr Prelec is co-author of the book Indulging Kleptocracy: British Service Providers, Postcommunist Elites, and the Enabling of Corruption (Oxford University Press, 2025), which has been recognised among the best books of the year by Foreign Affairs.

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