Sir John Jenkins is a former senior British diplomat. In a 35-year career he served as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Burma, Consul-General in Jerusalem and as the British Special Representative to the National Transitional Council and later Ambassador to Libya during the 2011 revolution. Between 2007 and 2009 he was FCO Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
In a 35 year diplomatic career he also lived and worked in Kuwait, the UAE and Malaysia. He was the lead author of the British Government’s Muslim Brotherhood Review in 2014. Between 2015 and 2018 he was Executive and then Corresponding Director (Middle East) at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), based in Manama, Bahrain and taught Middle East Politics for two semesters in 2017 at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.
He is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange, where he has written extensively on Islamism, Islamophobia and Extremism more generally, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Labour Middle East Council.
