Mat Burrows

Biography

Mathew Burrows is the Program Lead of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub and a Distinguished Fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program. Prior to joining Stimson, he served as the director of Foresight at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative and as the co-director of the New American Engagement Initiative.

Burrows is one of the leading experts on strategic foresight and global trend analysis. In 2013 he retired from a 28-year-long career in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the last 10 years of which he spent at the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the premier analytic unit in the US Intelligence Community. In 2007, Burrows was appointed Counselor, the number three position in the NIC, and was the principal drafter for the NIC publication Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, which received widespread recognition and praise in the international media. In 2005, he was asked to set up and direct the NIC’s new Long Range Analysis Unit, which is now known as the Strategic Futures Group.

In August 2013 he retired from a 28-year career in the CIA and State Department, the last ten being spent at the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the premier analytic unit in the US Intelligence Community. In 2007, he was appointed Counselor which is the number three position in the NIC and was responsible for managing a staff of senior analysts and production technicians who guide and shepherd all NIC products from inception to dissemination.

He was the principal drafter for the NIC publication Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, which received widespread praise in the international media. He also drafted two earlier editions of the report. Burrows joined the CIA in 1986, serving as analyst for the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), covering Western Europe, including the development of European institutions such as the European Union. From 1998 to 1999 he was the first holder of the Intelligence Community Fellowship and served at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Other previous positions included assignments as special assistant to the US UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (1999-2001) and deputy national security advisor to US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill (2001-02).

His book The Future Declassified: Megatrends that Will Undo the World Unless We Take Action (Palgrave/Macmillan) was published 9 September 2014.

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