Dr John Sunday Ojo (Research Fellow)

I am a post-doctoral research fellow focusing on Intelligence in the Global South at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University in the Netherlands. I serve as a consulting fellow at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) based at King’s College London. I also hold research fellow positions at NATO Veteran Initiative Research Institute and the Institute for Research and Policy Integration in Africa (IRPIA), housed at Northern Illinois University in the United States. I obtained a PhD from the University of Portsmouth in the UK, a Master of Arts in Global Development from the University of Leeds in the UK, and my second Master of Science in Urban Management and Development focusing on Environment, Climate Change, and Sustainability from Erasmus University in the Netherlands. I earned a Bachelor of Science in Local Government Studies from Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria.

A wide range of issues are at the core of my expertise, including armed conflict, non-state armed groups, terrorism, violent extremism, environmental governance, resource conflict, and African security. My research primarily focuses on the political economy of armed conflict, concentrating on non-state armed groups, intelligence-gathering strategies, recruitment, and radicalisation of violent extremism in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin region. My research encompasses both Jihadist and non-Jihadist armed groups operating along the Sahelian belt and Lake Chad region, including Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad. While African politics in the contemporary world, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations and the geopolitics of foreign military intervention and security cooperation also form critical components of my work, my research interrogates how such engagements impact African security governance. I have had the privilege of having my research published in reputable outlets such as Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, and Springer Nature. My works have been featured in esteemed journals and think tanks, including Civil Wars, Democracy and Security, Journal of Applied Security Research, African Security Review, Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), African Security, International Journal of Public Administration, International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review to mention a few.