Elan Journo

Personal life and education

Elan Journo was born in Jerusalem, Israel, and grew up in the United Kingdom. He studied at King's College London from 1994 to 1997, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy. He then earned a Master of Arts degree in Diplomacy from SOAS, University of London, studying international relations. Journo lives in Irvine, California. He has Israeli citizenship.

Career

Journo joined the Ayn Rand Institute in 1999, becoming a core-courses instructor at the Institute's Objectivist Academic Center in 2005. In 2009, he was the editor of, and the main contributor to, Winning the Unwinnable War: America's Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism, a collection of essays that argues for an Objectivist foreign policy of self-defence based on rational self-interest, as an alternative to neo-conservative nation-building. In 2010, he was appointed by the Institute as the Director of Policy Research, specializing in foreign policy.

Journo has contributed articles to Arutz Sheva, The Journal of International Security Affairs, Foreign Policy magazine, Fox News, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Houston Chronicle, The Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, the Middle East Quarterly, and others. He has also made television and radio appearances on outlets such as Fox News and NPR. Journo has given many talks to academic audiences, such as at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, New York University, and the United States Naval Academy.

Journo was a 2013 Lincoln Fellow at The Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank in Claremont, California, studying the application of Abraham Lincoln's and the Founding Fathers' political thought to modern-day policy-making.