The Scottish Council on Global Affairs: Advisory Board
Dame Mariot Leslie, DCMG, FRSE
Co-Chair
Former British diplomat. Member of the advisory boards of the Centre for European Reform and the Royal United Services Institute and former associate fellow of Chatham House. Director of the Scottish American Investment Company. Fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh.
During her diplomatic career she was UK Permanent Representative to NATO, Ambassador to Norway, member of the Joint Intelligence Committee and FCO Director General for Defence and Intelligence.
Professor Sir Hew Strachan FBA, FRSE
Co-Chair
Wardlaw Professor of International Relations, University of St Andrews; Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. HM Lord Lieutenant of Tweeddale.
Robert Brinkley CMG
British diplomat for 34 years: postings in Geneva, Moscow, Bonn, Moscow, Kyiv and Islamabad. Ambassador to Ukraine (2002 – 2006), High Commissioner to Pakistan (2006 – 2009). Chairman, The BEARR Trust (2012 – 2018); Senator, Ukrainian Catholic University (2013 -2019); Chairman, Ukrainian Institute London (2015 -2022).
Chairman, Chatham House Ukraine Forum (2015 – 2022); Trustee, Keston Institute (2015 – 2020); Chairman, Advisory Board, University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies (2018 – 2022).
Dr Kirsty Hughes FRSE
From 2017-2021, she was director and founder of the Scottish Centre on European Relations. She has worked at a number of leading European think tanks, including as Senior Fellow at Friends of Europe, Brussels; Senior Fellow, Centre for European Policy Studies; and Director, European Programme, Chatham House.
Dr Hughes was an academic at the Universities of Manchester and East Anglia.
Professor Ciaran Martin
Professor of Practice in the Management of Public Organisations at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, as well as a managing director at Paladin Capital and the holder of several other advisory roles in private sector cyber security. He writes and speaks frequently on cyber security in major outlets across the world, and was named one of the most influential people in European technology by Politico in 2022.
From 2014 until 2020 he set up and then led the United Kingdom’s world-leading National Cyber Security Centre, within the intelligence agency GCHQ on whose board he sat.
Mark Muller Stuart KC
Founder of Beyond Borders Scotland. Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics, and currently acts as a Senior Mediation Advisor to the UN Department of Political Affairs and the UN Special Envoy to Syria in the Syrian peace talks.
Prior to taking the UN post advised international bodies on conflict resolution, mediation, confidence-building, ceasefires, power-sharing, humanitarian law, constitution-making and dialogue processes and acted as a Senior Advisor to the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (Geneva), Beyond Conflict (Boston) and Inter-Mediate (London). Co-founder of the Delfina Foundation.
Sir David Omand GCB
Visiting Professor in War Studies Department, King’s College London. Formerly UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, Cabinet Office, Permanent Secretary Home Office, Director GCHQ and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy Ministry of Defence.
Author of Securing the State (Hurst,2010); Principled Spying (with Mark Phythian, OUP, 2018); How Spies Think (2020), How to Survive a Crisis (2023).
Dr Camilla Toulmin FRSE
Worked on African development for the last 40+ years, especially agriculture, land rights, climate change, and energy. Thirty years with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), her recent book Land, Investment and Migration: Thirty-five years of village life in Mali came out with OUP in 2020.
Now a Senior Fellow Africa-Europe Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and Professor Lancaster University.
Michael Wylie
Partner in investment firm Baillie Gifford & Co and is a member of the firm’s Management Committee. Oversight of a variety of operational areas and chairs the board of Baillie Gifford & Co Limited.
Prior to joining Baillie Gifford in September 2015, a Corporate Partner in a UK commercial law firm, head of the firm’s Financial Sector.
