Governing Board

Stefan Löfven has been the Chair of the SIPRI Governing Board since June 2022. Löfven was the Prime Minister of Sweden from October 2014 to November 2021 and the leader of the Social Democratic Party from 2012 to 2021. In 2022, he was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General to co-lead a High-level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism in preparation for the Summit of the Future. He was previously the International Secretary of the Swedish trade union IF Metall and, subsequently, its Chair (2006–12), and also Deputy Chair of the Swedish Trade Council (2004–12). Löfven has been a board member of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (2006–12), the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (2010–12) and the Olof Palme International Centre (2002–2006).

Dr Mohamed Ibn Chambas is a Ghanaian politician, lawyer, diplomat and academic. He is currently the African Union High Representative for Silencing the Guns. He previously served as Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for West Africa and Head of the UN Office for West Africa from 2014 to 2021. Chambas was the Joint Special Representative of the African Union–UN Hybrid Operation in Darfur and the Joint Chief Mediator in charge of the Darfur peace negotiations between 2013–14. From 2010 t0 2013, he was the Secretary General of the African Caribbean and Pacific Group. He served as President of the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) from 2007–2010 as well as the Executive Secretary of ECOWAS starting in February 2002, when ECOWAS was a Secretariat. 

Ambassador Chan Heng Chee is a Singaporean academic and diplomat. She is currently serving as Ambassador-at-Large at the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  She is an Honorary Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and the Chair of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies–Yusof Ishak Institute.  She is the Global Co-Chair of Asia Society.  Chan is Deputy Chairman of the Social Science Research Council, a member of the Science of Cities Committee, and National Research Foundation.  She is also a member of the Presidential Council for Minority Rights.  Previously, Ambassador Chan was Singapore’s Ambassador to the United States and Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

Dr Noha El-Mikawy is the Dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo. She is the former Regional Director of the Ford Foundation Office of the Middle East and North Africa (2012–22). El-Mikawy served as Team Leader for Governance at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Regional Center between 2005–2007 and 2009–12, supporting governance in Egypt, Jordan, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen. She was the Policy Advisor at the UNDP Oslo Governance Center in Norway (2007–2009), supervising the UNDP’s global project on governance assessments, legal empowerment of the poor, and gender-sensitive service delivery. She led comparative research on the political economy of MENA at the Centre for Development Research at the University of Bonn (Germany) in 2000–2005 and lectured on politics of the Middle East in Egypt and Germany (1991–2000). El-Mikawy holds a BA from the American University in Cairo and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno is a French diplomat and expert in peacekeeping, global governance and transnational security threats. He is currently a Senior Advisor at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation. He is a member of the team of senior advisors of the President of the General Assembly of the UN and, since 2014, Guéhenno has been a Distinguished Fellow with Brookings Institute. He was the Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General for the funding of the African Union Mission in Somalia and, from 2014–17, he was the President and CEO of the International Crisis Group. From 2000–2008 he was Under-Secretary-General for the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. 

Radha Kumar is the former Chair of UN University Council. She is a specialist in ethnic conflicts, peacemaking and peacebuilding, often from a feminist perspective. Previously, she was Director General of the Delhi Policy Group, the first independent think tank in India, the Director of the Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in Jamia Millia Islamia University and a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.  She served as a member of the Indian government’s Group of Interlocutors for Jammu and Kashmir. She has also been on the Board of the UN Institute for Training and Research and the Foundation for Communal Harmony (Ministry of Home Affairs, India). Kumar has written six books and numerous journal articles on peacemaking and democracy and holds a BA and MA from Cambridge University and a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.

Dr Patricia Lewis is an independent expert on international security, focusing primarily on arms control and disarmament. Lewis is a member of the EEAS Space Advisory Board and is Co-Chair of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Previously, she was the Research Director for International Security at Chatham House, the Deputy Director and Scientist-in-Residence at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute, and the Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and Director of Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC). She was a Commissioner on the 2014–16 Global Commission on Internet Governance and served on the 2010–11 Advisory Panel on Future Priorities of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the 2004–2006 Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. She was also an Advisor to the 2008–10 International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. Lewis received Ireland’s Presidential Distinguished Service Award in 2023 and the the American Physical Society’s Joseph A. Burton Forum Award in 2009 for her ‘outstanding contributions to the public understanding or resolution of physics’.

Dr Jessica Tuchman Mathews is a Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as Carnegie’s President from 1997 until 2015. She was the Director of the Washington programme of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow from 1994 to 1997. From 1982 to 1993, she was founding the Vice President and Director of Research of the World Resources Institute, an internationally known center for policy research on environmental and natural resource management issues. From 1977 to 1979, she was the Director of the Office of Global Issues at the National Security Council, covering nuclear proliferation, conventional arms sales and human rights. She has served in the US State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the White House.