James Crabtree is a geopolitical analyst and author with extensive experience living and working in Asia. He is a distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, a visiting fellow at the Asia Society in New York, and a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. Until recently, he was the Singapore-based Executive Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies in Asia, where he played a leading role in organising the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit, the region’s most important annual meeting of security and defence leaders.

Widely recognised as a commentator on economics and security in the Indo-Pacific, James was previously an Associate Professor in Practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School, Asia’s leading school of public policy. His book The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age was named an Amazon Book of the Year and shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year. He writes for a range of global publications, from the Financial Times and The New York Times to the Guardian and Wired. James spent ten years as a journalist and foreign correspondent, notably for the Financial Times, where he was Mumbai Bureau Chief. He previously worked as a senior advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, under Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, and has worked for various think tanks in London and Washington DC. He spent a number of years living in America, initially as a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

He is currently writing a book on the strategic importance of the “first island chain”, with a particular focus on US strategy.

 

Research Interest: 

• Security and Geo-economics in the Indo-Pacific
• US Strategy and the Geopolitics of the First Island Chain

 

Publications:

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age: James Crabtree. Tim Duggan Books, 2019

 

Research Centres and Groups:

• Centre for Grand Strategy
• Indo-Pacific research group