Leah Wawro is Director of Global Threats at Independent Diplomat. She joined the team in March 2019. Previously, Wawro was the Head of Conflict & Insecurity at Transparency International Defence. In this role, she led Transparency International’s work on defence and security sector corruption in fragile and conflict states, including in Nigeria, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and to strengthen accountability and anti-corruption in defence establishments, including the British Army, NAKO and the UN. Prior to this she led on advocacy for Transparency International Defence, and on building civil society’s expertise on anti-corruption in the defence sector.
Wawro is also a founder and board member of the Independent Defence Anti-Corruption Committee of Ukraine (NAKO), which she co-founded in 2016. The NAKO has successfully advocated for the audit of the largest state-owned defence company, Ukroboronprom, and helped reform Ukraine’s military procurement practices.
From 2014-15, Wawro was a Network Fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, where she worked on research into institutional corruption in the defence sectors of states transitioning to democracy. She has contributed to several books, including Indefensible: the seven myths that sustain the arms trade (Zed books, 2017) and Security in Nigeria: Defence, Terrorism and Politics in West Africa (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming).
She holds an MA in International Relations and Arabic from the University of St. Andrews.
