About

                        

John is a doctoral candidate in the International Relations Department at the LSE and an Adjunct Fellow at CSIS in Washington DC. His thesis is on Japanese foreign policy, strategic hedging, alliance structures and security policy in the Asia Pacific. He is also the Director and Founder of the Policy Dinner Club, held monthly at the Naval and Military Club in London.

In 2012, he became a visiting WSD-Handa Fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS, where he carried out research on US security policy on the Asia Pacific. Prior to this, John spent four years as a research analyst at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, where he worked in the Asia Security Programme with a focus on East Asian security, the Korean Peninsula, Japan, and US-China relations. While at RUSI, he also researched stabilization, and in 2011, carried out an assessment of South Korea’s Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT)  in Afghanistan for the Asia Foundation (TAF), published as a chapter in a Council of Foreign Relations book.

While working on his doctorate, John has served as the UK Secretariat at the UK-Japan 21st Century Group and has become involved with CSCAP-EU, the EU addition to CSCAP. He has given briefings at USFK, at the Defence Academy of the UK, at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and most recently, to the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK. In 2014-5, he was a visiting scholar at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Japan.

John holds an MA in International Peace and Security from King’s College, London and a BA  in Philosophy and the History of Ideas from Cardiff University. In addition to the UK, he has lived in the US, France, Japan, India and North Africa. He contributes  political analysis to various media from time to time, including CNN, the Observer, the BBC, the Mainichi Shimbun, the Diplomat, the National Interest and is a regular on Monocle 24 Radio. He has also published academic work in the Harvard Asia Quarterly, the RUSI Journal and International Politics Reviews.

He currently lives in London.