Professor Paul Cornish

Professor Paul Cornish MA (Hons), MSc (Econ.) PhD (Cantab.). Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Exeter. He is Director of Policy@Exeter (https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/networks/policy/) and founding Director of the Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence and Security

(https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/networks/policy/ourwork/cpuds/).

He is a graduate of the University of St Andrews, the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge. He began his career in the British Army before joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as an arms control and disarmament analyst. He has held lectureships at the UK Defence Academy and the University of Cambridge and professorial appointments at the universities of Bath and Exeter. At Exeter he was co-founder in 2013 of the Strategy and Security Institute and designer of the MA in Applied Strategic Studies (MStrat). He has held research and directorial appointments at several think tanks including Chatham House, the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College London and RAND Europe.  He became a member of the UK Chief of Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel in 2009, was a founding co-director of the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre at the University of Oxford in 2013, a member of the UK-China Track 1.5 discussions on cyber security, and in 2017 was Professorial Fellow in Cyber Security at the Australian National University. In 2019 he was appointed Visiting Professor at LSE IDEAS, the foreign affairs think-tank at the London School of Economics and has been Non-Resident Faculty at Blavatnik ICRC, Tel Aviv University since 2021. He is a member of the Commandant’s Strategic Advisory Panel and chair of the Academic Advisory Board at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and is an advisor to Henderson Risk Limited.

Paul Cornish has published widely in his areas of interest: arms control and disarmament; conflict, security and development; the ethics of the use of armed force; national strategy and defence policy; the future of armed conflict; and cyber security. He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Cyber Security, published in 2021, and author of A Very Short Introduction to Cyber Security, to be published in 2025. He publishes What the Octopus Knew, a series of essays on international security and strategy on Substack: https://substack.com/@whattheoctopusknew?utm_source=user-menu