Samir Puri

Samir Puri is a noted expert in geopolitics and defense policy. After completing his PhD in International Relations at Cambridge, Puri worked at RAND and the UK Foreign Office (2009–2015). Samir Puri’s assignments covered counter-terrorism, and a year in east Ukraine monitoring Russia’s first invasion and the onset of war in 2014. He also served as an international observer at five Ukrainian elections, including during the Orange Revolution in 2004.

After government service, Samir Puri held teaching positions in leading universities and prestigious think tanks. He was a lecturer in War Studies at King’s College London and taught at Cambridge and Johns Hopkins. Puri enjoys discussing the many sources of instability around the world and making sense of breaking events in relation to longer-term trends. In 2020, he moved to Singapore, where for three years he helped run the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, a summit that covers Asian security.

Samir Puri is currently an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. A prolific author, his latest book is Westlessness (2025), examines the shifting global role and coherence of the West amid a rising multipolar order. Drawing on perspectives from his vantage point in Asia, Puri unpacks the long arc of Western influence and the accelerating decline of its centrality through recalibration. Samir Puri makes the case that ‘Westlessness’ is not merely about the rise of China or the West’s internal rifts, but about a far broader transition as the demographic, economic, and ideological centre of gravity moves elsewhere. From BRICS+ diplomacy to waning Western consensus, the book explores what happens when the West is no longer the axis around which the world turns.

Puri’s other books include Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine (2022), which was described as “stimulating and thoughtful” by the Financial Times; and The Great Imperial Hangover (2021), which was called “well written, comprehensive and judicious” in The New York Times. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Samir Puri’s analyses of the war have been featured by the BBC, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. He has also contributed his insights to publications like Politico, Modern Diplomacy, The Diplomat and The New York Times, to name a few.