Ambassador Martin Kimani has spent his career operating at the intersection of diplomacy, security, and political legitimacy, working across national, regional, and multilateral systems to resolve conflict, build institutions, and negotiate power.

As Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the UN, he has been president of the Security Council and the Executive Board of UNDP, UNFPA, and UNOPS. His Security Council address of February 2022, delivered on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and viewed by millions, affirmed a core element of his leadership: the ability to bring moral clarity and strategic grounding to moments of international rupture.

Earlier, he directed Kenya’s National Counter Terrorism Centre and served as the President’s Special Envoy for Countering Violent Extremism. He advised three presidents through national and regional crises, from emergency evacuations to constitutional brinkmanship. He was key to the Building Bridges Initiative, a strategic response to electoral violence that became one of the most ambitious constitutional reform efforts in Kenya’s history. Grounded in systems analysis, it sought to address power-sharing, inclusion, and institutional stability. Though halted by the courts, it remains a foundational experiment in African political reform and a case study in designing for legitimacy under real political constraints.

His early work in financial markets and political risk analysis continues to inform how I align strategy with incentives and translate political vision into institutional outcomes. It grounds his approach in how power is read and acted upon across sectors.

His doctoral thesis, Genocide as Revelation: Religion, Race and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, examined how racial ideology, religious narrative, and institutional power coalesced to make mass participation in genocide both imaginable and executable.

He currently leads The Africa Center in New York. It marks a new stage in his work where diplomacy, strategy, and narrative converge. He is focused on helping position Africa and its diaspora as central actors in the world’s political, cultural, and economic future.