Naima Green-Riley is a Ph.D. 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.
Ms. Green-Riley specializes in Chinese foreign policy, with a focus on public diplomacy and the global information space. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science and in the 2021 book, The China Questions II (Harvard University Press). She has also written for 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 recipient of the 2020 Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Dissertation-Writing Grant at Harvard University. Her work has been supported by the Morris Abrams Award in International Relations, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, 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.
Her 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., Ms. Green-Riley was a Pickering fellow and a foreign service officer at the State Department, and she served in Egypt and China. In recent years, she has received recognition for her work in the foreign policy realm. During her doctoral program, she was selected as an international strategy fellow by Schmidt Futures and she was named a Black American Foreign Policy Next Generation Leader by New America. She is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
Ms. Green-Riley received a bachelor’s degree in international relations with honors from Stanford University. She was a Belfer Center International and Global Affairs Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, where she graduated with a master’s in public policy. She is proficient in Mandarin Chinese, and she maintains an intermediate-level proficiency in Arabic.