Chris Abbott is the founder and CEO of Open Briefing. Chris is a passionate advocate for human rights, social justice, and climate action. He worked with land, indigenous, and environmental defenders in Ecuador and the Philippines in the late 1990s, supporting their struggles against multinational oil and mining companies. He then spent a decade working at the policy level to protect civilians in conflict during the ‘war on terror’ and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The human rights champion Desmond Tutu described Chris’s work at that time as “radical in the proper sense”.

Chris was previously the deputy director of the Oxford Research Group and an honorary research fellow in the Centre for Governance and International Affairs at the University of Bristol and in the Department of Peace Studies and International Development at the University of Bradford. He is the author of two books and more than 50 influential reports and articles on security, politics, and history. He is the lead author of the Holistic Security Protocol for Human Rights Defenders and the creator of the Prevent/Respond Reference Card. Chris’s work has regularly featured in the international media, and he has been interviewed by the New York Times, BBC, Channel 4 News, Esquire, ABC, and the Australian.

Today, as well as leading Open Briefing, Chris is a director of Peace Brigades International and a member of its International Council and risk management committee. He is also a founding collaborator in the Civic Ecosystems Initiative and an adviser to the Funders Initiative for Civil Society (FICS).