Our people

Steve Brooking OBE is a former UK diplomatic service officer and former senior UN official; he was previously posted in Hong Kong, Beijing, Sarajevo and Bangkok.  He made the mistake of volunteering to be the first UK official into Afghanistan post-9/11 and didn’t manage to leave for 20 years. He served as Political Counselor and Charge d’ Affaires at the UK Embassy  and then from 2007 worked as Special Advisor to two Afghan Interior Ministers before joining the United Nations mission in 2010, ending up as Special Advisor and Chief of Staff as well as the acting Deputy Special Representative. From 2015 until October 2021 he was the UN’s main interlocutor with the Taliban. After a spell with the United States Institute of Peace writing a paper on why the Afghan peace process failed, he joined the European Institute of Peace in 2023 to work as a Senior Advisor focusing on the Afghanistan file.