After a long career as a foreign News Correspondent for the BBC, Karen Allen joined ISS in 2019 to lead the programme on emerging threats in Africa. She has spent the past 15 years living and working on the continent as a senior BBC Foreign Correspondent based in Nairobi, and Johannesburg and although she has covered conflict in many theatres, she shies away from using the word “War Correspondent”. Karen has also spent protracted periods of time based in Afghanistan and Iraq, most recently during the battle for Mosul in 2016 where she witnessed first hand the weaponization of shop bought drones by ISIS. She has combined her journalism with academic study and holds an MA in International Relations and Contemporary war from King’s College London. She is a Visiting Fellow the Department of War Studies at KCL and a contributor to a number of peer reviewed publications as well as contributing to a number of UK newspapers such as The Guardian. She has a particular interest in the relationship between international terrorism and global justice and how emerging tech offers great promise for deepening democracies but also has the potential to threaten them.
