Vanda

Felbab-Brown

Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. She is also the director of Brookings’ Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and of the Brookings series the Fentanyl Epidemic in North America and the Global Reach of Synthetic Opioids and co-director of the Africa Security Initiative at Brookings. Dr. Felbab-Brown is an expert on international and internal conflicts, insurgency, terrorism, urban violence, and illicit economies. Her fieldwork has covered Afghanistan, South Asia, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, Iraq, Somalia and the Horn of Africa, Nigeria, and other African regions. She is the author of five books - Narco Noir: Mexico’s Cartels, Cops, and Corruption (forthcoming); The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It (2017); Militants, Criminals, and Warlords: The Challenge of Local Governance in an Age of Disorder (2017; co-authored); Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan (2013); and Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (2010) as well as many policy reports, articles, opeds, and congressional testimonies. She frequently consults for the U.S. government. In 2020 and 2021, Dr. Felbab-Brown served as a senior advisor to the congressionally-mandated USIP Afghanistan Study Group. A recipient of numerous awards, Dr. Felbab-Brown received her Ph.D. in political science from MIT and her B.A. in government from Harvard University.