Ruth Townend is a senior research fellow with the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House. Her work focuses on climate risk and diplomacy, exploring the interplay of climate change, international affairs, and national and local politics. With 19 years’ experience in foreign policy, climate diplomacy, human rights and sustainability, Ruth has worked on a broad set of climate-relevant issues for and on behalf of governments, charities and respected internationally operating organizations.
Ruth leads Chatham House’s climate diplomacy work and hosts the ‘Climate Briefing’ podcast. With many years’ expertise in research methods, from qualitative surveys to innovative digital auto-ethnography, Ruth supports colleagues across Chatham House in learning, application and innovation related to research methods. She holds a degree in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
Laurence Broers is an associate fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. He has more than 20 years’ experience as a researcher of conflicts in the South Caucasus and as a practitioner of dialogue initiatives in the region. He is the author of Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of the Caucasus (Routledge, 2020) and Armenia’s Velvet Revolution: Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World (I.B. Tauris, 2020).
Arzu Geybulla is an Azerbaijani journalist and columnist. She is also a regional editor for the South Caucasus and Türkiye at Global Voices, an international community of writers, translators and human rights activists. Over the past 15 years, Arzu has written for numerous international and regional media outlets, including CNN International. In this time, she has also worked as a consultant with international human rights organizations. She continues her collaboration and affiliation with various international organizations and initiatives focusing on Azerbaijan and beyond, on issues such as transnational digital repression, digital authoritarianism, the safety of women journalists online, and platform accountability, to name a few.
Glada Lahn is a senior research fellow with the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House. For the past 20 years, Glada has worked on a range of international resource-related projects which intersect with geopolitics, trade and development. She has led influential research at Chatham House on energy policy in the Arab Gulf, cascading climate risks and humanitarian energy. Together with colleagues, she wrote some of the first studies detailing how climate-related economic transitions affect the choices and prospects of oil- and gas-producing developing countries, and how donors and multilateral agencies should respond.
Glada currently facilitates government and expert dialogue on managing fossil fuels through transition. She also works closely with several countries on research and dialogues to foster peace-positive and sustainable water governance. Independently, she has conducted consultancy for organizations including the International Energy Agency, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and various UN bodies.
Jody LaPorte is the Gonticas Tutorial Fellow in politics and international relations at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Her current research focuses on the political effects of corruption in the Caucasus and Central Asia. She also teaches and publishes on qualitative methods, including the development of new tools for qualitative and case study research. Her articles have been published in Comparative Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Sociological Methods and Research, Political Research Quarterly, Slavic Review and PS: Political Science and Politics. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
James Nixey joined Chatham House in 2000 and has been the director of the institute’s Russia and Eurasia Programme since 2013. He is also an associate fellow with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter, and serves on the board of the journal UA: Ukraine Analytica.
James’s principal research interests concern Russia’s relationships with the other post-Soviet states and with key international actors. His selected Chatham House publications include chapters in Putin Again: Implications for Russia and the West (2012), The Russian Challenge (2015), The Struggle for Ukraine (2017), Myths and misconceptions in the debate on Russia (2021) and, most recently, the conclusion and introduction to How to end Russia’s war on Ukraine: Safeguarding Europe’s future, and the dangers of a false peace (June 2023). James has also written for the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, Newsweek, USA Today, the BBC and CNN. He holds degrees in modern languages and international relations, and has previous experience in journalism (as a reporter in Moscow in the late 1990s).
Ľubica Polláková is the former assistant director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. Before joining Chatham House in March 2012, Ľubica worked at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University and at the British Inter-University China Centre. She has an MPhil in modern Middle Eastern studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Turkish and Islamic studies from the University of Manchester.
