Deputy Director - Defence & Security
RAND
United Kingdom
James Black is European Lead for Space, and Deputy Director at RAND Europe, the European arm of RAND, the world’s largest non-profit policy research institute. He previously led the Defence Strategy, Policy and Capability research portfolio in Europe. He alsoleads the RAND Europe Space Hub (RESH) and advises the Centre for Defence Economics and Acquisition. He has delivered a wide range of interdisciplinary studies for the Australian, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, Ukrainian, UKand U.S. militaries, as well as EU, NATO and UN agencies. He is also actively involved in wargaming, including as lead designer of strategic exercises at the Royal College of Defence Studies. Through the RESH, he has led research directly supporting developmentof the UK’s National Space Strategy and Defence Space Strategy, and related joint warfighting concepts, as well as conducting other classified and unclassified studies for national MODs, MFAs and space agencies across NATO Member States, Australia, Japan,and Ukraine, along with EU and NATO institutions. His focus areas include strategic competition; deterrence and escalation management, including around dual-use systems; the evolving contribution of space to multi-domain operations; lessons from Ukraine; andthe development of small and middle powers’ space (and counterspace) capabilities to contribute to collective defence and deterrence. He has also briefed national parliaments, high-level conferences, and international media, and has provided expert testimonyto the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the United Nations’s OEWG negotiations on responsible space behaviours. Prior to joining RAND, he worked in UK Parliament and for Transparency International’s Defence and Security Programme. He was also a non-residentNATO 2030 Fellow. He holds a double MA-MSc in International Relations and International Security from Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics, and a BA Hons in History from the University of Cambridge, where he was a scholar.
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