Karen Allen is a former BBC Foreign Correspondent and an alumni of King's College London. She spent nearly 15 years of her news reporting career based in East and Southern Africa as well as Afghanistan.

She has also worked in Iraq (2002, 2004, 2016) and Libya in 2012 and has an interest in the relationship between international justice issues and terrorism. She is currently based in South Africa at the Institute for Security Studies where she leads the programme on emerging threats in Africa. These include the unintended consequences of new technologies such as UAS/drones, and both cyber dependent and cyber enabled crimes including disinformation campaigns on social media and digital vigilantism. She contributes to a number of publications including NATO's Defence Strategic Communications as well as a number of international newspapers.