FOUNDER & MANAGING DIRECTOR

Mike founded CKS after working on complex sourcing, evidence, and analysis problems for more than twenty years. He manages the company’s strategic direction, leads project design and implementation, and routinely advises public and private sector clients.

Based in Dubai, he divides his time between the UAE, the UK, Canada, and assignments elsewhere. He maintains a portfolio of professional activities including scholarly research at King’s College London, and legal operations support to law firms in the UK and the UAE.

Professional Profile
Mike’s career has been spent in the direct service and general orbit of rule of law programmes and operations around the world. He spent seven years in early career military service with various infantry and intelligence units, six years as a civilian NATO official in the Balkans, Europe, and Afghanistan, and two years with the UN in Iraq. He spent a decade running a strategic intelligence and political risk consultancy in the UK, undertaking desk and field assignments for British, Canadian, American, and Norwegian government clients.

Working in consortia and with large primes, including BAE, Thales, and PWC, he mobilised project teams and delivered research and analysis that underpinned evidence-led government activities. Among other assignments, Mike advised a federal police war crimes unit in Eastern Europe on its evidence management protocols, managed nation-wide evidence digitization for the distributed counterterrorism judiciary of a Middle Eastern state, and coordinated a diplomatic initiative to preserve and translate the publications of a Southwest Asian state’s former government.

Research & Writing
Mike is a recognized specialist on the geopolitics of information, communications, and the rule of law. Concurrent with his previous consulting practice, he researched and lectured on international relations, organisations, and security at King’s College London, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and University College London. For the last five years, he has been a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London, where he founded and directs the Conflict Records Unit. That and his more recent consulting assignments led him to the subject of his next book, a history of intelligence, evidence, and consequence, and what they mean today in an AI-first world.

Notwithstanding hundreds of classified reports and briefings he’s drafted over the course of his career, Mike’s writing has been published in scholarly, trade, and popular outlets including Foreign Policy, Wired Magazine, CNN, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Civil Wars, Cultural Survival Quarterly, and others. He is the editor of four previous books, and the author of Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War, 1959-2009, published with Oxford University Press in North America and C. Hurst & Co Publishers in the UK / Rest of World.

Mike is an elected fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Royal Historical Society. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, a PhD in political science from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and a Graduate Diploma in Law from Birkbeck.