James Barnett

James Barnett is a research fellow at Hudson Institute. He specializes in African security and politics, and is co-editor of a Hudson journal, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, with Senior Fellow Husain Haqqani.

Mr. Barnett has lived in Lagos, Nigeria, for several years and has extensive fieldwork experience, including reporting from conflict environments across Nigeria and in Somalia, South Sudan, and Ukraine. He is also a nonresident fellow with the Centre on Armed Groups in Geneva and the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) in Abuja. He has worked as a consultant with international organizations such as the World Bank, Danish Institute of International Studies, and United States Institute of Peace, and he served as a long-term analyst on the 2023 International Republican Institute–National Democratic Institute international election observation mission to Nigeria.

His writing has appeared in publications such as New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, in journals such as West Point’s CTC Sentinel, and in edited volumes. He has testified before the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and been quoted widely in American and international media and appeared on television programs such as BBC News.

Mr. Barnett is a PhD (DPhil) candidate in politics at the University of Oxford. He holds an MA with distinction in war studies from King’s College London and a BA with highest honors in history and plan II from the University of Texas, where he also studied Arabic. He was previously a 2016–17 Boren Scholar at the University of Dar Es Salaam and a 2021 Fulbright fellow at the University of Lagos.