Meet James

James Patton Rogers is the Executive Director of the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. An expert on international security policy, disruptive technologies, and geopolitics, he is currently the NATO Country Director (PI) of the Full Spectrum Drone Warfare project, supported by NATO SPS, an MoD Defense Opinion Leader, and leads the Strategic Foresight Analysis component of the DoD-funded ($3m) Semiconductor Supply Chain project. He previously worked with the United Nations Security Council, United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism, EU Commission, and UK Parliament (amongst others) on the transnational threat of terrorist drones. James continues to work with the UN co-leading investigations into drone assassinations and the state and non-state misuse of disruptive and emerging technologies.

Before joining Cornell, James was Associate Professor in International Politics within the Center for War Studies and Danish Institute for Advanced Studies at SDU in Denmark, where he focused on technology, war, climate conflict and Arctic security. Prior to this, he was a fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford, SCANCOR at Stanford University, and both International Security Studies and the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University. He has also held visiting positions with the US Air Force Air Command and Staff College, Sandia National Laboratories, Loughborough University, and was an Associate Lecturer at the University of York (UK). He obtained his PhD from the University of Hull (UK).

The author of two books (published in 2023 and 2024), he is currently working on ‘Drones: What Everyone Needs to Know’ for Oxford University Press (with Professor Sarah Kreps) and ‘War Path: A Global History of Long-Distance Warfare’, a non-fiction trade book to be published by Bonnier in 2025. His peer-reviewed academic articles have been published in The International Journal of Human Rights, International Politics, International Peacekeeping, The Geographical Journal, and  Defense and Security Analysis (amongst others). In 2019 he co-founded BISA War Studies, which has grown to become one of the largest sections of the British International Studies Association.

James prioritizes public engagement as part of his research impact and is a previous TEDx Speaker. He regularly writes for the Washington Post, TIME, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and provides expert comment for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC. As an experienced broadcaster, he has worked with Netflix, the History Channel, PBS, NPR, History Hit, and CNN; while his Warfare podcast reached over 640,000 monthly listeners (12.6 million all-time) in 180+ countries.