Janani Krishnaswamy’s research interests include intelligence, transatlantic security and counter-radicalization. She holds an MA in International Relations from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and an MA in Communication from the University of Madras. She has worked in two prominent public policy think tanks in London and Washington and in a global security firm in London. Besides, she has been a journalist for four years including two years at The Hindu Business Line.
Janani has gained invaluable – and highly relevant – experience in using a wide range of qualitative and quantitative research techniques and providing foreign policy consultancy on several security issues. Combining data journalism and intelligence gathering, she has facilitated intense data mining, using Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) data gathering tools. A great deal of her research has been used by research scholars for a variety of purposes, including intelligence briefings, policy reports, recommendations, evidences for Parliamentary committees, publications, debates, military briefings, media requests and research proposals.
As an Intelligence and Research Intern at global security firm G4S Risk Management, she was involved in producing analytical intelligence reports for 220 countries across the globe, with a focus on Asian countries. Having made several risk analysis and security threat assessments, she has gained expertise in developing unbiased geopolitical assessments.
As a Research Intern at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) at Britain’s leading cross-party think tank Demos, she played a major role formulating Demos’ oral and written evidences for a Parliamentary Joint Committee headed by UK Home Secretary Theresa May on the controversial Draft Communication Data Bill. She also spent much of her time at Demos analyzing the research potential of free and paid social media monitoring tools for a major project looking at EU conversations in multiple languages. She has also helped in providing policy consultancy to the UK government on a wide range of issues including online surveillance, privacy, SOCMINT (social media intelligence) and online hate speech.
She has worked on several high-impact projects at the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute relating to US foreign and security policies in relation to China, Russia and several central-Asian countries.
As a student at King’s, she specialised in Conflict Simulation and has simulated a two-player wargame simulating the Allied Re-Conquest of Burma. In the near future, she intends to develop a wargame simulating the War of Kurukshetra.
Research :
As a Public Policy Scholar at The Hindu Centre, Janani evaluated the intelligence failures in the post 26/11 era and developed a theory of intelligence, specific to the internal security scene in India.
Read Policy Report No. 3 here: Why Intelligence Fails.
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