Gareth Stansfield is a nonresident senior fellow with the Transatlantic Project at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. Stansfield is also the pro-vice-chancellor and executive dean for the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Exeter, where he is also a professor of Middle East politics. He is also a senior fellow of the Changing Character of Warfare Programme at the University of Oxford and a fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
Since 2014, Stansfield has been a civilian deployable expert attached to the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office’s Office for Conflict Stabilisation and Mediation.
Stansfield is an internationally recognized scholar on the politics of the Middle East, focusing on conflict causation and management, post-conflict rehabilitation, and the security dynamics of the Gulf countries. He has extensive fieldwork experience, including in Iraq and its Kurdistan Region, as well as in Syria and Afghanistan. He was a UK-funded adviser to Kurdish parties in Iraq from 1996 to 2001, and a senior political adviser to the United Nations (UN) special representative of the secretary general in Iraq from 2008 to 2010. He has also served as a senior adviser to the Force Reintegration Cell of the International Security Assistance headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan; as a senior adviser to successive Permanent Joint Headquarters’ chief of joint operations; and senior adviser to the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office’s Anti-ISIL Task Force. He was previously the pro-vice-chancellor of the College of Social Sciences and International Studies and the director of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies.
Stansfield has also been a global fellow at the Wilson Center and an associate fellow with the Royal Institute for International Affairs. He was awarded an Order of the British Empire in the New Years Honours 2024 for services to UK interests in Iraq.