Disposing of Rhino Horns Recovered from Smugglers, Kruger National Park, South Africa
CONFLICT
AWARENESS
PROJECT
Holding accountable those who fuel war, conflict, and harm to vulnerable communities and the natural world.
Acerca de
Brian Freskos, Senior Researcher and Data Analyst
Brian Freskos is an award-winning journalist and an expert on arms trafficking and the U.S. firearms trade. He serves as the Conflict Awareness Project’s senior researcher and data analyst. Before joining CAP full-time in March 2022, Brian worked for many years as a consultant to the organization. He assisted in compiling CAP’s groundbreaking 2019 report “Follow The Guns: An Overlooked Key to Combat Rhino Poaching and Wildlife Crime,” which showed how weapons tracing was an invaluable tool in the battle against wildlife trafficking. Brian is also part of the Forum of the Arms Trade’s Emerging Expert program.
Brian has been carrying out extensive investigations into the arms trade and other topics of public interest for more than a decade. From 2016 to 2022, Brian worked as a reporter for The Trace, a nonprofit journalism outlet dedicated to covering gun violence in the U.S. Brian’s work has also been featured in The New Yorker, USA Today, The Guardian, and many other national and international news outlets, and he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, and BBC World Service as a commentator on firearms policy.

Brian was twice named as a finalist for the Livingston Award, which recognizes outstanding reporting by a journalist under the age of 35. In 2018, he was part of a team that won the New York Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Deadline Club Award for an investigative series titled Missing Pieces, which exposed the violent consequences of the U.S. gun theft epidemic. Brian holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.