Executive committee
We bring together foreign policy professionals from in and outside Westminster.
Co-chairs
Sam Goodman
Sam is the Senior Director of Policy at the China Strategic Risks Institute. Previously he worked as a political adviser to the Labour Party and a parliamentary researcher, and has a background in British foreign policy as an associate of the British Foreign Policy Group. He is the author of the Imperial Premiership: the role of the modern prime minister in foreign policymaking 1964-2015 (Manchester UP, 2016) and has contributed to a number of media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Diplomat, the Globe and Mail, and RUSI.
David Lawrence
David is a Research Fellow at Chatham House. Previously he worked as a political adviser to an NGO. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. He has written for various publications and think tanks including the Independent, Politics Home, Foreign Policy Centre and New Economics Foundation.
Executive committee
Edward Elliott
Edward is Edward is a specialist in UK foreign policy, with a focus on soft power and sports diplomacy. He helped found the British Foreign Policy Group in 2016 and worked there as Head of Research and Operations and subsequently as Senior Associate. He has contributed to numerous outlets including The Spectator, The Times, RUSI, and LSE Politics and Policy, and is also the Director of SportsDiplomacy.org, a consultancy that has worked on sports diplomacy strategies for the UK and the United States. (He currently also works for the multinational renewable energy company, Iberdrola, on their sports sponsorship work).
Ben Horton
Ben is Head of the Director’s Office at Chatham House. He also leads the Common Futures Conversations project, a digital platform which facilitates dialogue between young people and policymakers across Africa and Europe. He holds degrees from the universities of London and Oxford.
Anisa Mahmood
Anisa is the founder and director of the Anti-Islamophobia Working Group. The group brings together different civil society organisations and experts to tackle Islamophobia in the UK. She previously served as a Senior Labour Policy Researcher and Advisor. Her expertise includes race and discrimination, human rights and foreign policy. She helped develop the Labour Party’s Islamophobia policy, has organised the annual Islamophobia Awareness Month campaign in Parliament and in 2021 successfully secured the first ever Parliamentary debate on the subject.
Anisa also sits on the executive committee of the New Diplomacy Project and is a board member of Labour Campaign for Human Rights.
Heather Staff
Heather Staff is a Policy Adviser for the RAMP project, supporting the APPG on Migration and Labour Party parliamentarians on migration and refuge policy. She is the Chair of the Labour Campaign for International Development and executive board member for a number of organisations in the UK and Europe.
Dr Jade McGlynn
Jade is a Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research focuses on Russo-Ukrainian relations, Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine since 2014, Russian propaganda and the politics of memory.
Jade is the author of two books: Russia’s War, which examines the roots and forms of popular support for war on Ukraine, and Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia. She received her DPhil, which focused on Russian propaganda and identity construction vis a vis Ukraine and the ‘West’ from the University of Oxford in 2020.
Jade is a non-resident senior associate in the Europe Program at CSIS and speaks Russian and Ukrainian and lived in Russia for five years.
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