Ty McCormick is a news editor for Asia-Pacific at Agence France-Presse, based in Hong Kong. Previously, he was a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, the magazine published by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. A former foreign correspondent in Nairobi and before that in Cairo, he has reported from more than a dozen countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. He covered the civil wars in Somalia and South Sudan; U.N. peacekeeping operations in Mali, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and refugee and migration stories across sub-Saharan Africa. He has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and National Geographic, among others. His book, Beyond the Sand and Sea: One Family's Quest for a Country to Call Home, was published by St. Martin's Press in March 2021.
From 2015 to 2018, he was the Africa editor of Foreign Policy, based in Nairobi. There he led a team of journalists that won a 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for a series on African migration. For his reporting on war crimes in the Central African Republic, he received the 2016 Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Bronze Prize from the U.N. Correspondents Association. He has also been a finalist for the Kurt Schork Award and for international journalist of the year at the One World Media Awards in Britain.
He began his career as a freelance correspondent in Cairo, where he covered the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath and worked briefly as a reporter/researcher at The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. He has also worked as an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, advising Fortune 500 companies and leading financial institutions on East African markets. A term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and master’s degrees from the University of Oxford and the Queen's University Belfast, where he was a Mitchell Scholar.