Dr Nikki Ikani is Assistant Professor Intelligence and Security at Leiden University, and a Research Fellow at KCL. Additionally, she is a Senior Non-Resident Associate Fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome. Ikani is an expert in crisis anticipation and early warning, with a focus on identifying the warnings and warning failures preceding crisis situations. This interdisciplinary approach shapes her teaching, research, public engagement, and her writing. In 2023, she obtained the NWO Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council, to fund the four-year research project WARN, into the topic of warning.

Her previous research project at King’s College London was the ESRC-funded INTEL research project together with Professor Christoph Meyer and Professor Michael Goodman. Ikani co-edited the main output of this project Estimative Intelligence in European Foreign Policymaking (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). She also published a monograph on crisis, Crisis and Change in European Union foreign policy (Manchester University Press, 2021). 

Qualifications

• BA Public Administration, Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University
• MSc (Cum Laude) Political Science/International Relations, University of Amsterdam
• MA European politics/Affaires Européennes, Sciences Po Paris
• PhD European and International Studies, King’s College London

Research interests

• Early and strategic warning
• Crisis anticipation
• Intelligence studies
• European Union foreign policy
• Public administration
• Foreign policy analysis

Teaching

• EU foreign policy change
• European intelligence production and use
• Intelligence and policymaking
• Foreign policy analysis

Selected publications

• Beyond the Binary: A New Typology for Evaluating Warning Success and Failure in Strategic Surprise, International Studies Review, 2025
• Mosul, 2014 – The Rise of ISIS. Contemporary Intelligence Warning Cases: Learning from Successes and Failures, edited by Bjørn Elias Mikalsen Grønning and Stig Stenslie, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025,
• Estimative Intelligence in European Foreign Policymaking, co-edited with Christoph Meyer, Eva Michaels, Aviva Guttmann, Michael S. Goodman, Edinburgh University Press, 2022
• Crisis and change in European Union Foreign policy: a framework of EU foreign policy change(Manchester University Press: Manchester), 2021
• European foreign policy in times of crisis: a political development lens, 2020, Journal of European Integration, 42: 767-82.
• An analytical framework for postmortems of European foreign policy: should decision-makers have been surprised?, 2020, Nikki Ikani, Aviva Guttmann & Christoph Meyer, Intelligence and National Security: 1-19.
• Change and Continuity in the European Neighbourhood Policy: The Ukraine Crisis as a Critical Juncture', 2019, Geopolitics, 24: 20-50.