Alfredo Somoza

Alfredo Somoza’s three main areas of work are: international cooperation, tourism, and media.

Concerning international relations and cooperation, he is chairman of ICEI (Institute for International Economic Cooperation) since 2003, a Milan-based NGO that operates in Latin America, Asia, and Italy. ICEI manages economic cooperation projects funded by the European Union, the Italian ministry of foreign affairs, local public institutions, and private donors. He has advised numerous public Italian institutions on the topic of international cooperation, among which the Italian ministry of foreign affairs. He is also chairman of the umbrella organization of Lombardy-based NGOs.

Concerning tourism, he is the founder and former chairman of the Italian Association for Responsible Tourism (AITR). He was appointed to the board of the UNWTO (the UN agency for tourism), to the scientific committee of ENIT (the Italian national tourism agency) and to the “Destination Expo 2015” committee of the municipality of Milan. He advised the ministry of tourism of Argentina, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Uruguay. For the past ten years he taught classes about sustainable tourism at ISPI in Milan.

Concerning media, he is editorialist and foreign politics analyst at various media outlets, including Vatican Radio, Swiss public broadcasting, Rai Radio III, EastWest geopolitics magazine, and has a blog on the Huffington Post.

Furthermore, he collaborated with the research activities of various universities, European institutions and think tanks, such as the Centro Studi Politica Internazionale (Rome) and the Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues (Paris), for which he worked on the topic of narcos in central America. As anthropologist specialized in South American studies, he participated in the working group on indigenous populations sponsored by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.