Dr Neville Bolt is the Founder and Director of Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communications, and the Editor-in-Chief of NATO Defence Strategic Communications academic journal. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo; Senior Fellow at SCERU, University of Tokyo; and Visiting Scholar at St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. For twenty years he was Reader in Strategic Communications and Convenor of the Masters and Doctoral programmes in Strategic Communications in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is a graduate of the University of Oxford and a former journalist/television producer, specialising in conflict and war zones in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
2023-present – Founder & Director, Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communication, London & Riga
2020-present – Executive Board Member, Centre for Defence Strategies, Kyiv, Ukraine
2020-present – Chairman, Strategic Communications Laboratory Georgia, Tbilisi, Georgia
2017-present – Reader in Strategic Communications, Department of War Studies, King’s College London
2016-present – Convenor of the MA in Strategic Communications, King’s College London
2018-present – Chief Academic Advisor, Open Information Partnership (OIP) at the UK FCDO.
2017-present – Member of Editorial Board, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT).
2017-present – Chief Academic Adviser, the Terminology Working Group, NATO Strategic Communications
Centre of Excellence, Riga, Latvia.
2016-present – Director, King’s Centre for Strategic Communications (KCSC), King’s College London
2016-present – Editor-in-Chief of Defence Strategic Communications, NATO peer reviewed academic journal
2018-2019 – External Evaluator for MSc in Disinformation at Royal Holloway University of London.
2009-2016 – Co-Convenor, MA Evolution of Insurgency, Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
NON-ACADEMIC EMPLOYMENT AND EXPERIENCE
1998-2004– Policy Adviser (EU affairs), UEFA, Switzerland
1997-2004 – Founder, The WORKS Design and Branding Agency.
1991-1992 – Policy Adviser, Spanish Government’s World Trade Fair ‘Expo 92’.
1990-1997 – Founder, C21C publisher.
1981-1984 – War Zone Producer and Director, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and PBS, USA.
1976-1981 – Producer and Director, BBC Television News and Current Affairs, UK
EDUCATION
2007-2010 – PhD in War Studies, King’s College London
2006-2007 – M.A. in Conflict, Security and Development, King’s College London.
(O’Dwyer-Russell Prize)
1971-1974 –B.A Modern Languages and Literature, The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. (Fletcher Scholarship)
- The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). CHOICE ‘outstanding academic status award’.
- Unmapping the 21st century: Between Networks and the State, co-authored with Nicholas Michelsen (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022)
- ‘Propaganda of the Deed and its Anarchist Origins’, in Nancy Snow, Paul Baines, and Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, (editors), The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda, (London: SAGE, 2019)
- ‘Strategic Communications in Crisis’, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 15, Issue 4, 2011.
- ‘The Leak before the Storm: What Wikileaks Tells Us about Modern Communication’, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 155, Issue 4, 2010.
- ‘Propaganda of the Deed and the Irish Republican Brotherhood: From the politics of ‘Shock and Awe’ to the ‘Imagined Political Community’’, The RUSI Journal , Vol. 153, Issue 1, 2008.
- ‘Propaganda of the Deed 2008: Understanding the Phenomenon’, co-authored with David Betz & Jaz Azari, RUSI Whitehall Report, No. 3-08, 2008.
- Strategic Communications and Disinformation in the Early 21st Century, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence, Italy, 2021.
- Clarifying Digital Terms, edited and co-authored with Elīna Lange-Ionatamišvili, Leonie Haiden, and Julian Hajduk, Riga: NATO StratCom CoE, 2020.
- Improving NATO Strategic Communications Terminology, edited and co-authored with Leonie Haiden, Riga: NATO StratCom CoE, 2019.
- How Did The Nordic-Baltic Countries Handle The First Wave of COVID-19?, edited and co-authored with Elīna Lange-Ionatamišvili, Iselin Engebretsen, Miranda Karin, Michélsen Forsgren, and Rakin Sayed, Riga: NATO StratCom CoE, 2021.
