Federica Saini Fasanotti is a nonresident senior Fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center
for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at the
Brookings Institution. She is also a Senior Associate of ISPI in Milan. She is a historian
specialized in counterinsurgency and asymmetric wars. Her fieldwork and research
cover Libya.
She has published seven books on military history like Vincere! The Italian Royal
Army Counterinsurgency Operations in Africa 1922-1940 (United States Naval
Institute, 2020) and La Forma della Guerra. Le origini del pensiero occidentale di
controguerriglia (Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito Italiano, 2022), a wide-ranging study
on history, methods, and pillars of counterinsurgency in the modern era.
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.