MATT WILLIAMS
ABOUT ME
A freelance journalist and creative content and communications professional with seven years of experience working on humanitarian crises and conflicts around the world. I am currently a newsletter and social editor at The New Humanitarian and The Telegraph.
I have written for The Economist on various human rights issues including the war in Ukraine and Afghanistan. I am also a specialist in open-source investigations with a focus on the Russo-Ukrainian War and the Ethiopian civil war. I was previously at The Economist, Centre for Information Resilience, Action on Armed Violence and Amnesty International.
I was a social editor in The Economist’s award-winning audience team and have written about filtration camps, missing Russian soldiers and enforced disappearences in the Russo-Ukrainian War and Gaza. I also published a byline for The Sunday Times Magazine on a war veteran’s experiences in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. During my time at the University of Nottingham, I edited Impact Magazine’s sports section.
PUBLICATIONS
The Economist
Russia is struggling to find its missing soldiers
Kidnappings of aid workers soar
Myanmar is ablaze as its war churns on
A genocide suspect faces trial
Misery by design: The Rohingya crisis
Violence in Afghanistan has dropped under the Taliban
Russia is disappearing vast numbers of Ukrainians
Why is Russia setting up detention centres in Ukraine?
A record number of journalists are in prison
No escape: the plight of the Rohingya worsens
Left behind: Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis
A parched planet: drought and desertification
It’s not just covid-19: health services in Africa
A spiralling crisis: global hunger
Britain’s police in the dock: violence against women
The Intelligence: Why is Australia suffering from a mouse plague?
Open-source investigations
Ethiopian Civil War
Deadly crackdown in Somali region
Fano militias burning civilians
Allegations against Tigrayan forces using UN symbols
Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers collaborating on Tigray’s border
Eritrean soldiers rounding up civilians
Arab-Israeli conflict
Clues to a targeted killing in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Other activities
I developed workshops to train staff at Ethiopian Human Rights Commission to capture user-generated content and conduct open-source investigations in Addis Ababa.
I supported the Centre for Information Resilience’s Eyes on Russia Project.
I KILL YOU FOR NOTHING (2021): After a decade of political turmoil, war and widespread atrocities in the 1990s, the Balkans have slipped from the headlines and communities have been attempting to rebuild and cope with the legacy of conflict. Two decades after wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Slovenia, North Macedonia and Serbia, I travelled the region in 2018 and 2019 photographing life in the post-conflict Balkans, European conflicts which remain relevant today as populism and nationalism grip the Western world
FRACTURED LEVANTINE (2020): In 2016 and 2017, I travelled to Israel, Lebanon, Palestine and occupied Syria where I documented life and conflict, ever-lurking beneath the surface, in a small part of the Middle East
Action Against Hunger
Strife
The Conflict Archives
Why is violence surging in Darfur?
Sudan's coup has intensified repression in an unstable Darfur region
Sea turtles are back from the brink in the Cayman Islands
Colonialism spawned the zombie film genre
Fire and Sword: The pogrom that shaped the war in Nagorno-Karabakh
The Black Mountains: The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict for beginners explained
How Tsarist Russia's collapse shaped the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
Is a man-hunt for Syria's war criminals possible in the “Age of Impunity”?
Interview: Dr. Ahron Bregman on the Impending Revolt in Israel
State of Shock: Inside Bangladesh's "mega-camps" and the Rohingya Genocide
Is war looming again in Syria's Gaza?
"The tip of the iceberg" - Ethnic cleansing and genocide in Syria
Syria's international conflict has fractured the Middle East
How Trumpian populism met chaos with chaos in the Middle East
Assad's circle is clinging to power, pulling Syria deeper into the abyss
Under Covid-19 lockdown, Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem face worsening police violence
For Ethiopian Jews in Israel, police brutality is an epidemic
War within a war - Israel and Hezbollah's shadow conflict in Syria
Syria's winter of terror: The war for Idlib
Top ten books for beginners on the Middle East
The killing of Qassem Suleimani in Iraq will carry grave repercussions across the Middle East
The militant Salafi-jihadist movement is hydra-headed, Baghdadi's death will change little
Crushing Rojava: Turkey’s war in Syria
The mass graves of ISIS’s caliphate
Ballots, bullets & intifada: Iraq after the Caliphate
Iraq's ongoing intifada demonstrates that Islamic State’s rise was a symptom of a deeper crisis
Corruption, drugs, guns and human trafficking - Libya’s descent into hell
Between twin terrors: Life under Assad’s regime and Islamic State
"The worst is yet to come" - The war for the Middle East
The conflict in Idlib is threatening to extend the Syrian War and refugee crisis
The Syrian War: The looming assault on Idlib
Mitrovica: The divided city in Kosovo threatening stability in the Balkans
Libya’s war: “My Generation, The Next Generation, is Gone.”
Western airstrikes against the Assad regime will not cure Syria's ills
The Syrian War: Afrin encircled
The Syrian War: The fall of Afrin & Eastern Ghouta
Syria is the epicentre of a modern Thirty Years' War
An interview with Breaking the Silence's Nadav Bigelman
From refugee to activist: An interview with Dr. Nooralhaq Nasimi
The final assault on Mosul's Old City will not end the Iraqi civil war
The Libyan connection and the threat of extremism to Britain