Bronwen Maddox

Bronwen Maddox is the Director and CEO of Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs), the UK's leading Foreign Policy think tank, a role she has held since August 2022. She was cited in the context of the V-Dem Institute's March 2026 reclassification of the United States from 'liberal democracy' to 'electoral democracy', a downgrade that pushed the US Liberal Democracy Index ranking from 20th to 51st globally.

Maddox joined Chatham House after six years as Director of the Institute for Government. Before moving into think-tank leadership she had a career spanning investment banking, investigative journalism at the Financial Times, US editor and foreign editor of The Times, and editor of Prospect magazine. She read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St John's College, Oxford, graduating in 1985. Chatham House has been an active analytical voice throughout the Iran-US conflict: its research assessed early in the campaign that if the conflict persisted for months, Brent Crude could reach $130 and the eurozone would 'probably' contract in Q2 , while a separate Chatham House paper argued that the UK's attempt to distinguish 'defensive' and 'offensive' base use 'blur[s] the line between lawful self-defence and unlawful war on Iran' .

Maddox's commentary on the US democracy downgrade carried weight as a signal from the European Foreign Policy establishment that American democratic backsliding was being monitored and assessed by allied institutions, not only adversarial ones. Her institution's sustained commentary across the Iran conflict — on succession dynamics, economic costs, and UK legal exposure — has reinforced Chatham House's role as a primary analytical reference for British and European policymakers navigating the conflict's diplomatic and legal dimensions.