Richard Nephew is the Bernstein Adjunct Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has spent much of his career in the U.S. government in various capacities. From 2022-2024, he was the inaugural U.S. Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption at the Department of State. He was also elected as the President of the Conference of the States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption in December 2023. Previously, he served as the Deputy Special Envoy for Iran (2021), Principal Deputy Coordinator for Sanctions Policy at the Department of State (2013-2015), and Director for Iran at the National Security Council (2011-2013), and in several senior civil service staff roles from 2003-2011.
He is a Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. Nephew joined Columbia in 2015 and, since that time, he has written dozens of reports and articles for various publications focused on geopolitics and their intersection with energy markets, economic statecraft, nuclear topics, and sanctions. He is also the author of The Art of Sanctions: A View from the Field, published by Columbia University Press in 2018. He was a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution from 2015-2021.
In addition to his appointments at Columbia and The Washington Institute, he operates his own consulting LLC, Go Beyond Compliance.
