Federica Saini Fasanotti

Federica Saini Fasanotti is a Senior Associate Fellow at ISPI. She is also a nonresident Senior Fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, of the Foreign Policy program at The Brookings Institution. In 2004, she gained a PhD degree at the University of Milan, with a study on controversial relationship between Fascism and the Italian Red Cross.

She is a specialist of counterinsurgency. She is a military historian expert in African colonies: her studies have covered Libya and the Horn of Africa, but also Afghanistan. She is a frequent lecturer at military history conferences and congresses, and is a guest lecturer for the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Her many published essays and articles have also appeared in historical and geopolitical journals.

She developed for Rai-National Italian Television the series “The History of Fascism” (2006) and “The Second World War” (2009), distributed by “Il Corriere della Sera”. She has published five historical books and she is publishing the last one with the Naval Institute of Annapolis on the Italian Counterinsurgency Operations in Libya and Ethiopia (1922-1940).

In September 2016 she testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs about terrorism in Libya. She has collaborated with the Pentagon and with Secretary of Defense James Mattis as a consultant on Libya. She has worked as an advisor on the Maghreb for Terna Group, the first grid operator for electricity transmission in Europe.