Federica Saini Fasanotti is a Senior Associate Fellow at ISPI (Istituto per gli studi di politica internazionale) and former nonresident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. She holds a PhD in the controversial relationship between Fascism and the Italian Red Cross. Specializing in counterinsurgency, she is a military historian whose interests focus on African colonies, particularly Libya, the Horn of Africa, and Afghanistan. She has been a consultant on Libya for James Mattis, former US Secretary of Defense, and in September 2016 she testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs about terrorism in Libya.