John is Director of Academic Engagement at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, based in our office in Vienna.

John also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development (JIED), LSE Press, and Board member of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSPD). He is a Fellow at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Hong Kong and a Visiting Fellow at Shanghai University.

At GI-TOC, John leads a series of academic engagement projects, including serving as Chair of the Steering Committee of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime (IASOC); Research Coordinator for our collaboration with the SOC ACE project hosted by the University of Birmingham; GI-TOC lead for our Drugs and Development Hub collaboration with GIZ GPDPD; and coordinator for a major Open Society Foundations project examining the intersection of drug policy reform and organized crime. John has focused on building research and policy capacity in a number of core GI-TOC focus areas, including West Africa, Ukraine, Colombia, Brazil, East and Southeast Asia and Afghanistan.

Before joining the GI, John was Founding Executive Director of the LSE’s International Drug Policy Unit (IDPU), a Fellow of the LSE US Centre and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Yale Centre for the Study of Globalization.

John’s historical research focuses on the political economy of international drug control. He earned a PhD from the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. John’s contemporary policy interests focus on the political economy of international drug control and the evolving dynamics on national and international policy reforms. In 2022 he published a book on the Regulatory History of UN Drug Control with Cambridge University Press.