Zorka Kordić

Zorka Kordić was born in Kotor in 1981. She attended masters studies in international
relations and international protection of human rights at the Italian Institute for
International Organizations SIOI in Rome, which is specialized for educating Italian
diplomats. In 2005 she completed four-year studies of English language and literature,
with Italian as her second language, at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić, and
continued her studies in several foreign languages at renowned institutes in Rome,
Moscow and Brussels. She is fluent in English, French, Italian and Russian, with basic
knowledge of German.

She began her diplomatic career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2010, preceded by
a one-year engagement with the Presidency of the Council of Ministers of the Republic
of Italy – in the International Relations Service of the School of Public Administration in
Rome, and then an internship at the Embassy of Montenegro in Rome. In the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, she first worked in the Directorate General for Consular Affairs and
Diaspora, with a brief diplomatic engagement at the Embassy of Montenegro in London
in 2012. After the formation of the structure for negotiations between Montenegro and
the EU, she continued her work in the Chief Negotiator’s Office within the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and European Integration and simultaneously as the Secretary of
Working Groups for negotiations with the European Union for Chapter 17 – Economic
and Monetary Policy and Chapter 9 – Financial Services.

She was appointed Director General for Strategy Coordination in the Ministry of
European Affairs in April 2017, after the diplomatic service in the Mission of
Montenegro to the European Union in Brussels.

She has been working on the improvement of quality of the Government’s strategic
documents and the policy planning system since 2017. She is the co-author of the
Methodology for Policy Development, Development and Monitoring of the
Implementation of Strategic Documents, which represents the backbone of the reform
of the strategic planning system in Montenegro and the coordination of public policies.

Since 2018, she has been the Assistant Secretary General of the Government for
Strategic Coordination, and since the beginning of 2020, she has been a negotiator in the
accession negotiations with the EU for Chapter 25 – Science and Research.

As part of the negotiating structure for Montenegros accession negotiations with the
EU, as a negotiator for science and innovation, she is Montenegros representative in the
ERAC –  the Council of the EU strategic policy advisory committee on topics related to
research and innovation.