Dr Thomas Rid
Room K7.18
Department of War Studies
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS
Email: thomas.rid@kcl.ac.uk
Phone: 00 44 (0) 207 848 1156
Office hours: Wednesdays and Fridays, 16.00-17.00
Areas of interest
Biography
Dr Thomas Rid is a Reader in the Department of War Studies at King's College London and a non-resident fellow at the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, DC.
In 2010/2011, he was fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Constance, Germany. The previous year, Rid was a visiting scholar at the Hebrew University and the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2009 he worked at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the RAND Corporation in Washington, and at the Institut français des relations internationales in Paris. Rid wrote his first book and thesis at the Berlin-based Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Germany’s major government-funded foreign policy think tank. Rid holds a PhD from the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Research & consultancy projects
Thomas Rid published three
books,
Understanding Counterinsurgency (Routledge 2010, co-edited with Tom Keaney),
War 2.0 (Praeger 2009, with Marc Hecker, currently translated into the Chinese by the People’s Liberation Army Press), and
War and Media Operations (Routledge 2007). His
numerous articles appeared in major English, French, and German peer-reviewed journals as well as magazines and newspapers.
Currently Rid is mostly working on two main projects. One, Open Arms, is a book-length study of how different armies use social media, co-authored with Marc Hecker and funded by the French defense ministry. The second is a project on cyber security, in cooperation with the Department of Informatics at King's College and funded by the Minerva Initiative of the U.S. Department of Defense.
A scholarly focus on novel technologies requires keeping a critical distance to volatile trends and maintaining a historically grounded perspective -- therefore Rid is also, when he finds the time, working on a book manuscript that tries to liberate the concept of deterrence from its suffocating cold-war corset by reconnecting two long-standing debates on deterrence with each other, one in the theory of war and conflict and one in the theory of law and criminology.
Dr Rid is also a regular contributor at Kings of War, the blog of the Department of War Studies.
Doctoral supervision
Dr Rid’s expertise is in the following areas and he welcomes PhD students who wish to study topics that fall into these subjects:
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Cyber security
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Subversion and insurgency
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Irregular war and counterinsurgency
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Terrorism and counter-terrorism
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Deterrence
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Military and the media, new and old
Recent Publications
Download a full list of publications