Ambassador Peter Semneby has spent a large part of his career in senior positions with the Swedish Government and international organizations on conflict management and resolution, mainly in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. As Swedish Special Envoy for the conflict in Yemen, Ambassador Semneby was instrumental in gathering the Yemeni conflict parties in Stockholm in December 2018 for the first agreement since the war began, and he was a driving force behind bringing the Sana’a Center’s first Yemen International Forum to Stockholm.

Ambassador Semneby is currently the Swedish Government’s Special Envoy for the Korean Peninsula. He previously served as the Swedish Special Envoy for the conflict in Yemen (2018-23), the Special Envoy for Libya (2017-18), Ambassador to Lebanon (2015-17) with concurrent responsibility for Syria, and Ambassador to Afghanistan (2012-15). He also served in Swedish diplomatic missions in Germany, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union, and briefly as chargé d’affaires of the Swedish Embassy in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1997.

As the European Union’s Special Representative for the South Caucasus (2006-11), he worked with the EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy Solana and the leaders of the countries in the South Caucasus on regional conflicts, political crises, and human rights. He was head of two Missions of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE): in Latvia (2000-02), and in Croatia (2002-05), where he worked largely on minority issues and regional cooperation and helped prepare those countries for their European and Euro-Atlantic integration.

In addition to his membership on the Board of Trustees of the Sana’a Center, he is, inter alia, a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the Strategic Council of the European Policy Centre in Brussels. He was also a Senior Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

He was educated at the Universities of Uppsala and Stockholm, the Stockholm School of Economics, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.