• Nonresident Fellow

Naima Green-Riley

Naima Green-Riley is a PhD Candidate and Raymond Vernon Fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University and a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Following her doctoral defense, she will be joining the faculties of the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Naima specializes in Chinese foreign policy with a focus on public diplomacy and the global information space.

Naima’s academic work intersects with her contributions to global development and diplomacy. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Oxfam America. Before pursuing her Ph.D., she was a Pickering Fellow and a Foreign Service Officer at the U.S. Department of State. Naima was the Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Alexandria, Egypt during the Arab Spring (2011-2013). She also served as a Consular Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou, China (2014-2015). She is a Schmidt Futures 2020 International Strategy Fellow and she was featured on New America’s 2020 list of Black American National Security & Foreign Policy Next Generation Leaders.

Naima’s writing has been published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science (JEPS) and it has appeared in various public-facing outlets, including The Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post, the Emerging Voices on the New Normal in Asia Series of the National Bureau of Asian Research, The Diplomat, and The Root. She is a 2017 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and a 2020 International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network (IPSCON) Scholar. Her work has been supported by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, the Morris Abrams Award in International Relations, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. It has also been supported by several interdisciplinary centers at Harvard, including the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Center for American Political Studies, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the Harvard Experimental Working Group.  

Naima received a Bachelor’s degree (BA) in International Relations with honors from Stanford University. Moreover, she was a Belfer Center International and Global Affairs fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she graduated with a Master’s degree in Public Policy (MPP). She is proficient in Mandarin Chinese, and she also has an intermediate-level knowledge of Arabic.