Mr. Lars Georg Fordal is an international relations expert, specializing in Eastern Europe, Russia and former Soviet republics. As the leader of the Norwegian Barents Secretariat his main task is to facilitate cross border cooperation and understanding between people in Northern Norway and North-West Russia.
Mr. Fordal has a degree from Moscow State Institute of International Relations and the University of Tromsø, Norway, specializing in Russian politics, language and history. Mr. Fordal has 10 years’ experience from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as consul and Deputy Head of the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in Murmansk (2009-12), from the Norwegian embassies in Moscow, Russia (2007-09) and Vilnius, Lithuania (2006-07) and as an adviser to the MFA in Oslo (2012-14).
Mr. Fordal was deployed with the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine (2014-16) in the regions of Chernivtsi, Donetsk and Luhansk where he was planning, coordinating and reporting on the observation of conflict, ceasefire, reform and development of society.
Mr. Fordal became head of the Norwegian Barents Secretariat in September 2016. The Norwegian Barents Secretariat is built on the central philosophy that misunderstandings, skepticism and wrongful predispositions are reduced when ordinary people of different nationalities come together and share common projects. Also called the people-to-people cooperation. The Norwegian Barents Secretariat’s main goal is to make it as easy as possible to initiate and fund Norwegian-Russian cross border cooperation involving all areas of society (more info at https://barents.no/en).