Samuel Jardine, Project Lead

Samuel Jardine is a geopolitical consultant and historian specialising in strategic competition, governance, grand strategy, and risk management, focusing particularly on space, the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the seabed. He is an advocate for the utility of Applied History within contemporary geopolitics and policy and combines this with the utilisation of OSINT.

He has been a featured lecturer for institutions such as the Royal College of Defence Studies, the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre, and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and has been published extensively including by Routledge. Sam has a comprehensive track record of project managing sensitive and complex multidisciplinary geopolitical and related research projects for government, defence, industry, and academia-based clients including the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, UK Ministry of Defence, Lord Kerslake’s Parliamentary Office, the UN World Food Programme, World Economic Forum, UK Police, Red Cross, Confederation of Indian Industry, and Global Citizen.

For Open Lunar, Sam is the Stakeholder Engagement Lead for the Registry and formally was the project lead for its 2024 Phase 3. He is also a researcher and Affiliate for the organisation at large. He has represented Open Lunar at several government and international events and conferences, including at UN COPUOS, UN Sustainable Lunar Activities Conference, the UN Space Law and Policy Conference, and the IAC.

Outside of Open Lunar, Sam is the Head of Research at London Politica (a geopolitical risk think tank), a Senior Advisor for Luminint (a risk intelligence firm), and a Policy Specialist for the Lunar Policy Platform. He is also a Research Associate for Oxford University and the British Army’s Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research’s Climate Change & (In)Security Project (CCIP) which supports the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Climate and Security and a Research Affiliate for the Center for Space Governance.

Sam is also a Research Consultant for the Royal United Services Institute’s (RUSI) Defence, Industries and Society Programme, where he was previously a Military Sciences “Rising Stars” Thought Leadership Programme Mentee. Additionally, he is a Consultant for Mabway where he provides policy, geopolitical, and human-terrain-related expertise and support for the design, implementation, and delivery of UK Armed Forces warfighting and sub-threshold field exercises.

Sam was formally the Project Manager for Lord Kerslake's independent crossbench commission on  UK Military Accommodation initiated at the request of Labour Shadow Defence Secretary, John  Healey and supported by King's College London's Policy Institute and the House of Lords. He also was a Fellow of the Arctic Institute, Ecologic Institute and MiH-RCN-hosted Arctic Geopolitics programme, as part of its militarisation working group, and a Fellow with the Foresight Institute on its Space Technologies programme.

He holds an MA in Modern History from King's College London and a  BA (Hons) in History from the Open University and was selected as a 2021 mentee on RUSI’s Military Sciences Rising Stars thought leadership programme.