Trustees
Chair of the Board
Keith Sargent FRGS FRSA
Keith is an independent adviser and trainer, specialising in supporting the achievement of appropriate and sustainable socio-economic development, good governance and integrity in public life, and public sector reform. He has worked in the field of international development and state building for over 45 years in both traditional development and fragile state contexts. He has advised governments and donor agencies, including UN agencies, the World Bank, the European Commission (EC) and European Development Fund (EDF), and the UK Government’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), Department for International Development (DFID) and Stabilisation Unit (SU). Previous positions include as the first Director of the Integrity Commission, Turks and Caicos Islands Government; as Counsellor to the first State Prime Minister of Bosnia i Herzegovina, post the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord; and various academic appointments including Manager of the Warwick Development Group, Warwick Research Institute and lecturer at the Development Planning Unit, University College London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a registered Deployable Civilian Expert (Governance Core) with the Office for Conflict Stabilisation and Mediation (OCSM), formerly the Stabilisation Unit (SU).
Trustee
Simon Shelly
Simon worked as a member of the Diplomatic Service in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), now Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) from 1983 to 2023. Simon completed substantive overseas postings at the British Embassies in Kabul, Paris and Ankara. His career as a Generalist included multilateral work: where he represented the UK at four international organisations, bilateral policy, economic policy, Human Resources, Diversity and Inclusion, and Learning and Development - latterly as Head of Learning in the International Policy Faculty within the FCDO's internal International Academy. Over the course of his career, he did diplomatic business on behalf of the UK in around 20 countries. In the later years of his career, Simon worked extensively on Europe, including as Lead Policy Planner for Europe, then as a Senior Europe Research Analyst, leading on the Benelux Union, its three member countries and France. Simon speaks near native French, working level German and Dutch, and basic Turkish and Spanish.
Trustee
Phil Shelton MBA
Phil is CEO of HousingAI Ltd, an AI-powered regulatory guidance platform for the UK social housing sector. He has over two decades of experience leading high-performing teams in technology and social housing, including founding and growing SDS Ltd into the UK's leading housing development software company before a successful exit in 2023. Phil is skilled in providing strategic and operational support to senior leaders, with extensive expertise in stakeholder engagement, scaling businesses, and complex project management. He has been invited to speak at Cranfield School of Management, where he completed his Executive MBA, and studied business programmes in the USA and India. He is a Trustee of the Cranfield Trust, providing strategic guidance to charity leaders and expertise to support non-profit growth. Under the Trust's pro bono support scheme, he advised the CSIG on financial matters for over a year before joining as a Trustee, where he continues to provide his financial acumen.
Executive Committee
Chief Executive Officer
Alan Waldron CBE AFC SLJ
Alan is an independent adviser and trainer specialising in defence corruption risk reduction analysis, remedial measures and attitudinal change delivery, with particular expertise in contract award and implementation. He has nearly 20 years international anti-corruption experience, engaging in over 40 countries (with particular emphasis on fragile states) from Afghanistan to Ukraine at the highest military and political levels, much of which was during his time with Transparency International where he was the Senior Military Advisor. He has developed and lead the advocacy, analysis, change management and delivery of training and capacity building anti-corruption programmes and tools currently used by NATO, the UK and many other Governments globally. He has held a range of UK key appointments in major organisations and Ministries including, the Royal Air Force’s Director of Training and the Director of Air Operations in the UK Ministry of Defence.
Head of Education and Training
Prof. Rob McCusker
Rob is the Head of Academic Delivery and Development at David Game Higher Education (DGHE) in London and a transnational crime adviser who provides strategic and policy advice to international organisations on any crime which crosses a border. He is also the Transnational Crime Director at Global Risk Alliance Ltd in London, a member of the Advisory Board of the Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Centre in the USA, which provides research and analytical capability for the Bureau of Counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism at the US Department of State, and both a member of the Global Advisory Board and Partner (Senior Advisor Compliance) at Strategic Swiss Partners in Zurich. Rob was the former Transnational Crime Analyst for the Australian Institute of Criminology (a statutory agency within the Minister for Justice's portfolio) and is currently a retained expert on ‘anti-corruption and good governance’, ‘anti-money laundering’, ‘combating organized crime’ and ‘combating terrorism and its funding’, respectively, for the Economic Crime and Cooperation Division, Council of Europe, a retained expert on ‘anti-corruption’ for the Regional Anti-Corruption Initiative, European Union and the Principal UK Expert for the International Standard (ISO) 37003 on Fraud Controls.
Strategic Development Adviser
James Nixey
James Nixey is the former director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the International Affairs Think Tank Chatham House, a position he held since 2013. Prior to that role he served in various roles for the institute since 2000. He is also an Associate Fellow with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, the Conflict Studies Research Centre and an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter, and serves on the board of the journal UA: Ukraine Analytica. His principal research interests concern Russia’s relationships with the other post-Soviet states, and key international actors. Selected major publications include chapters in Putin Again: Implications for Russia and the West (2012), The Russian Challenge (2015), The Struggle for Ukraine (October 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 Russia’s Future and the Dangers of a False Peace (July 2023). James has also written for The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, Newsweek, USA Today, BBC.co.uk and CNN.com. He holds degrees in modern languages and international relations and has previous experience in journalism (as a reporter in Moscow in the late 1990s).
International Advisory Board
Head of International Advisory Board
Henry Hogger CMG FRGS
Henry has spent 35 years as a British diplomat, the larger proportion of which has been in the Arab world. Amongst his posts have been those of UK High Commissioner to Namibia, Ambassador to Syria and Governorate Coordinator for Basra in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Since retiring from the foreign service in 2004 he has undertaken some 20 election observation missions, spanning five continents, for the EU, Commonwealth and other organisations. He has also participated in stabilisation training exercises for the UK Government; and is a Senior Consultant with Middle East Consultants (MEC) International Ltd, with whom he has worked on an initiative to protect the rights of religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East. As a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he chairs the UK’s southern region branch.
International Advisory Board
Dr Eleanor Gordon
Eleanor is Director of Monash GPS (Global Peace and Security) and Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations. Her research and practice focus on building security and justice after conflict and inclusive approaches to peacebuilding. Eleanor has a PhD in Criminology and has spent 25 years working in the field of conflict, security and justice, including over a decade working in UN peace operations in management and advisory roles with the UN and other international organisations. She has been War Crimes Advisor to the High Representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Head of the BiH Human Rights Coordination Centre, Deputy Head of the Human Rights and Rule of Law Department in the Office of the High Representative (OHR) iin BiH, Head of the UN Refugee Agency Satellite Office in Eastern Republika Srpska covering Srebrenica, Chef de Cabinet for an EU technical mission in BiH, Political Advisor to the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), Coordinator in the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), and UN Gender Mainstreaming Focal Point. Her work has included building state security and justice institutions, working with demobilized guerrilla groups, addressing war crimes and human rights violations, promoting gender equality and inclusive approaches to peacebuilding, and addressing issues related to organised crime and terrorism. Since leaving the UN, Eleanor has worked at a number of universities, provided consultancy services to various international organisations, NGOs, governments and universities, including the UN Development Programme (UNDP), World Bank (WB), Saferworld, The Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF), The Asia Foundation (TAF), International Alert, the Croatian Agency for Science and Higher Education (ASHE), and the Open University (OU) UK. She is a Member of the World Bank Group's Global Influencer Barometer Panel, Expert Member of UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab, Member of RUSI’s Strategic Hub on Organised Crime research, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK), and, until recently, Senior Fellow of the Centre for Security Governance, Saferworld Trustee, and Deployable Civilian Expert with the UK Government's Stabilisation Unit. Eleanor is an Associate Editor with 'Stability: Journal of Security and Development' and on the Editorial Board of 'ScienceRise: Juridical Science', a Ukrainian-based journal covering state formation and law-making in war/post-war contexts.
International Advisory Board
Omar Ousman Jobe
Omar is a development studies and management specialist. He is the Executive Director of the Centre for Sustainable Development and Governance (CeSDAG), a Gambian CSO promoting social justice, central and local government accountability and equity. He is currently serving as a consultant, Project Manager on the Africa Centre of Excellence (ACE) Project funded by the World Bank to transform the Gambia Technical Training Institute (GTTI) to the University of Applied Science, Engineering and Technology (USET). Previous assignments include as Adviser on Governance and Public Sector Management in the development of the Gambia’s Second National Development Plan, (2023-27); advising the Gambia’s Constitutional Review Commission (CRC) in a review of the 1997 Constitution; advisory assignments for Action Aid, Child Fund and other CSOs, as well as the National Human Rights Commission; and assignments for regional and international agencies including ECOWAS, the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), UNICEF and the EU. Omar is bi-lingual (French-English
International Advisory Board
Avgustina Tzvetkova-Karabascheva
Avgustina’s expertise lies in the geo-politics of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, regional cooperation and Euro-Atlantic integration. Until her recent retirement she held (from 2016) the position of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Bulgaria to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Prior to that she served as a defence and security adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria, as political adviser to the Minister of Defence, and as Deputy Defence Minister with a portfolio encompassing strategic planning and defence policy, bilateral consultations, relations with NATO and the EU, and anti-corruption policies. She has served as a Vice President of the Atlantic Treaty Association, chaired the Euro-Atlantic Education Initiative Foundation, and served as a subject matter expert for NATO’s Building Integrity (BI) programme and as senior adviser at Transparency International (TI)-UK Defence and Security Programme. She has lectured internationally at major centres including the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany; the National Defence University, Shrivenham, UK; the National Defence University of Ukraine; the International Anti-corruption Academy, Vienna, and the European Centre for Security Studies, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. She has participated as a speaker at major international conferences including the UN Anti-corruption Convention in Panama and the Sixth Global Conference of Parliamentarians Against Corruption in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
International Advisory Board
Maciej Wnuk
Maciej is an independent adviser and trainer specialising in governance and anti-corruption, and currently a visiting lecturer at Poland’s National School for Public Administration and Warsaw’s Military University of Technology. He has advised at the highest levels across Poland’s public service and in its Defence Sector. His appointments include those of Special Representative for Governance and Anti-Corruption, and Senior Counsellor with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Senior International Adviser and Director of the Anti-Corruption Procedures Bureau with the Ministry of Defence. He has been instrumental in the development of Codes of Conduct for both civilian and military personnel; advised the Anti-Corruption Panel of the EU Eastern Partnership, NATO Building Defence Establishments Programme; and has been a member of Peer Review Teams evaluating integrity self-assessments in Bosnia Herzegovina, Ukraine, Croatia and Latvia. Formerly a Board Member of Transparency International Poland, he is the author of many reports and publications on anti-corruption, including “Basics of Anti-corruption for Public and Private Entities”, Forum Media, Polska, Poznań, 2017.
International Advisory Board
Peter Gudgeon
Peter is a development economist, specialising in economic management systems development, and financial, economic and social analysis of public sector technical support programmes. Presently he is the manager of a small, specialist development management consultancy. Previously he held senior advisory positions on technical cooperation at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. For 17 years he was a Senior Interregional Adviser with the Department of Technical Cooperation for Development (DTCD), backstopping and providing technical support for UNDP funded country- based projects and programmes in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Subsequently, he was a Senior Technical Cooperation Adviser in the Office of the Under-Secretary General, UNDESA (the Department of Economic and Social Affairs), where amongst other activities he became member of the UN Development Group (UNDG) and advised the Humanitarian Trust Fund for Human Security. Prior to joining the UN in New York, he held the positions of Chief Technical Adviser and Team Leader of a UNDP/World Bank team supporting economic management in the Ministry of Finance and Planning in Uganda; and, financed by the UK's Overseas Development Administration, Economic Adviser to the Economic Planning unit in Sabah Malaysia under the Colombo Plan. Previous positions included as economic management consultant with Coopers and Lybrand Associates (now Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC)); economic adviser attached to the Secretariat of the Royal Commission on the Press under the auspices of the Civil Service Commission, UK Government; and as Nuffield Fellow with the Overseas Development Institute where he advised as regional economist in Uganda. He is the author of numerous project reports and papers.
International Advisory Board
Dr Mark Charlton
Dr Mark Charlton is Associate Director of Sustainable Development Goal Impact and Net Zero Research Theme Director at De Montfort University (DMU), UK. He also teaches public policy in the Department of Politics. Since 2014, Mark has worked closely with the United Nations (UN) on a number of campaigns that engage university staff and students in global issues. Since 2016 Mark has led the United Nations Academic Impact Global Hub for Sustainable Development Goal 16, based at DMU, working across the university to develop research and teaching outputs that seek to impact and promote indicators of the SDGs. Following a recent programme of change to chairing responsibilities for all SDG hubs, instigated by the UN , Mark now heads the SDG 11 Hub at DMU.
International Advisory Board
Dr Lennon Chang
Dr Lennon Chang is Associate Professor, Cyber Risk and Policy, in Deakin Cyber Research and Innovation Centre and School of Information Technology, at Deakin University, Australia. He is also the Vice Chairman of the Asia Pacific Association of Technology and Society which he co-founded in 2012 and the founder of Cyberbaykin: Myanmar Cyber Security Awareness campaign. Previous appointments include as Assistant Professor of criminology in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the City University of Hong Kong, and as researcher and project manager at the Science and Technology Law Centre, Institute for Information Industry, Taiwan. He is particularly interested in the regulation and governance of cyberspace in the Asia-Pacific region. His book ‘Cybercrime in the Greater China Region: Regulatory Responses and Crime Prevention’ (Edward Elgar, 2012) is about the nature and range of responses to cybercrime between China and Taiwan.
Associate Fellows
Nadja Milanova PhD
Nadja has extensive experience in multilateral diplomacy, international affairs, and security and defence, both within a national and multilateral context. She has dedicated the last 15 years of her career to promoting security sector governance and building integrity in the defence sector as part of the Ministry of Defence of Bulgaria and at present, at the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as deputy team leader of the organisation’s Governance and Institutions Team. In this capacity, Nadja has contributed to the development of the NATO Building Integrity Policy and is in charge of Building Integrity in NATO and partner countries providing strategic advice and capacity building on good governance in the defence and security sector. Prior to this, Nadja had worked for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as Head of its Prague Office, served as diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and had led the Bilateral and Regional Cooperation Department of the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Bulgaria. Nadja has experience in the field of human rights and civil society advocacy work at both the United Nations and the European Union, and in academia with research on conflict resolution and crisis management. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and is invited as a guest lecturer. She holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, and an MA in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, USA.
Dr Ahmet Erdi Öztürk
Dr Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is a Reader in Politics and International Relations at London Metropolitan University and a Non-Resident Fellow at ELIAMEP, the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. He is currently Chair of the Ethnicity, Nationalism and Migration Studies Section of the International Studies Association (ISA-ENMISA), co-editor of the Edinburgh University Press book series on Modern Turkey, and an editor of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. Dr Öztürk’s research has been supported by several highly competitive international funding bodies and academic institutions. Between 2021 and 2023, he held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, funded by the European Commission, at Coventry University and the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). He was previously awarded Swedish Institute doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University, between 2017 and 2019. In 2019, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Residence at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. His work has also benefited from support and affiliations with institutions including the British Institute at Ankara, the Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes, and leading European research centres working on migration, religion, foreign policy and regional politics. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Strasbourg in November 2018 with the highest distinction, (très honorable avec félicitations du jury). His dissertation, Religion, Identity and Power: Turkey’s Desire for Domination in the Balkans under the AKP Rule, examined the relationship between religion, identity, foreign policy and regional influence. He also holds an MA in Political Science from Hacettepe University and an MRes in Political Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His research focuses on the intersection of religion, politics and international relations, with particular emphasis on religion’s role in foreign policy, conflict, peace processes, transnational politics, authoritarianism, diaspora politics and Turkish foreign policy. His work combines political science, international relations and area studies, with a strong empirical focus on Turkey, the Balkans, the Middle East and wider European security debates. Dr Öztürk is the author, co-author or editor of more than ten books, over fifty peer-reviewed journal articles and twenty-five book chapters. His commentary and analysis have appeared in international outlets including Open Democracy, The Conversation, HuffPost and France 24, and his policy reports have been published by leading institutions such as the Berkeley Center, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and the Middle East Institute. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the CEFTUS Academic Excellence Award in 2024, the ISA Religion and International Relations Section Emerging Scholar Award in 2023, the ISA ENMISA Distinguished Emerging Scholar Award in 2022, Coventry University’s Exceptional Performance Award in 2021, and London Metropolitan University’s Outstanding Early Career Researcher Award in 2020.
Richard Austin CPP AMBCI
Richard is a senior consulting and national security leader with more than two decades’ experience helping governments and public institutions operate with greater integrity, resilience and impact. His career spans frontline international law enforcement, complex security environments, and senior consulting roles across defence, cyber, resilience, and public sector transformation. Richard has led high-stakes programmes in the UK, Latin America, Africa and South Asia, building trusted partnerships with ministers, police leaders, prosecutors, civil servants and international stakeholders. As an International Liaison Officer in Peru he used his experience, diplomacy and trust building skills to drive anti-corruption initiatives, secure senior government buy-in, influence legal and policy change, participate in an international working group to coordinate donor country support, and strengthen inspection and accountability mechanisms within the Peruvian National Police (PNP). He also led an Interior Minister sponsored, multi-organisation effort to develop a ten-year policing strategy by bringing together multiple actors within the criminal justice sector around a shared reform agenda. A committed capacity-builder, Richard established Peru’s first police leadership academy, trained national trainers across 27 police schools enabling officers to benefit from leadership development. By the end of his tenure, Richard had transferred programme ownership directly to the Peruvian National Police, the first known example of a programme being started by a donor country before being adopted and funded in its entirety by the PNP. He also strengthened forensic and crime scene investigation capability, promoted practical collaboration between agencies that had historically struggled to work together, and encouraged the development of the relationships with police forces of neighbouring countries, and achieved significant capability and capacity building outcomes in Pakistan and Somalia. Now working in the private sector, Richard’s work continues to reflect the ambition of UN Sustainable Development Goal 16 with a focus on helping public and private sector organisations increase their resilience in the face of disruption caused by cyber, social, political, environmental, physical, or any other threat through the application of contextualised business continuity and resilience best practice.