Federica Saini Fasanotti is a nonresident fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, of the Foreign Policy program at The Brookings Institution. She is also a senior associate of ISPI. She is a historian specialized in counterinsurgency and asymmetric wars. Her fieldwork and research have covered, among others, Afghanistan, Libya, and the Horn of Africa. Her current book project is The Counterinsurgency Doctrine from the XVII Century to the present, a wide ranging study on the history, methods, and pillars of counterinsurgency in the modern era.
She is going to publish with the Naval Institute in Annapolis a book on Italian counterinsurgency in Africa from 1922 to 1940. She has been a consultant on Libya for James Mattis, the former US Secretary of Defense and for the Terna Group, the first grid operator for electricity transmission in Europe.