James Barnett
Fellow
James Barnett is a non-resident research fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. specializing in conflict and geopolitics in Sub-Saharan Africa and a research fellow at the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) in Abuja, Nigeria. He also works as an
independent consultant and has advised international NGOs, the private sector, and Western governments on African security. He has extensive fieldwork experience in conflict environments, most especially across Nigeria as well as in Somalia, South Sudan, and Ukraine.
Mr. Barnett was a Fulbright researcher based at the University of Lagos, Nigeria in 2021 and a Boren Scholar at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2016–17. He served as a long-term analyst on the IRI-NDI election observation mission to Nigeria in 2023 and he has
previously worked as a researcher with organizations such as the United States Institute of Peace, Africa Center for Strategic Studies, and American Enterprise Institute.
His journalism and analysis have appeared in publications such as Foreign Policy, New Lines Magazine, War on the Rocks, African Arguments, and the Los Angeles Review of Books as well as research journals such as West Point’s CTC Sentinel. Along with Hudson fellow Husain Haqqani, he edits Hudson Institute’s journal Current Trends in Islamist Ideology. He has also been interviewed by media outlets such as Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Al Jazeera, Asharq, BBC News, Le Monde, Premium Times, and Voice of America and he has testified before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
Mr. Barnett holds a BA with highest honors in history and Plan II from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA with distinction in war studies from King’s College London. He is presently pursuing a DPhil in Politics at Oxford University.
He speaks Swahili, Arabic, and Spanish.
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