Nicole Ball is a Senior Analyst at the Archive focusing on the roles that external actors play in the security and economic affairs of African countries.
Throughout her career she has specialized in democratic security sector governance, conflict management and recovery, and donor financing in conflict-affected states and regions. Since the mid-1990s she has conducted assessments, evaluations and lessons learning exercises for multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the OECD Development Assistance Committee. She has also supported the work of major development and security assistance donors such as the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, the European Union, Sweden, Germany, Japan and the United States through policy analysis and advice. This work has given her first-hand knowledge of conditions in conflict-affected regions in Africa, the Middle East and East/Central Europe as well as Afghanistan.
From 1987-1990, she was the Archive’s Director of Analysis and series editor for the first seven document sets in the “Making of US Policy” collection.
She has also held positions at the University of Sussex, the Swedish Institute for International Affairs, the Overseas Development Council and the Center for International Policy, where she is currently a Senior Fellow Emeritus. She has also been a senior visiting senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (‘Clingendael Institute’) in The Hague, a senior security and justice advisor at the UK Government’s Stabilisation Unit and an advisor to the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance.