Dr Neville Bolt

Dr Neville Bolt is the Director of the King’s Centre for Strategic Communications (KCSC), a leading global centre of expertise in strategic communications.

He is Reader in Strategic Communications and Convenor of the Masters programme in Strategic Communications in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Bolt is Editor-in-Chief of Defence Strategic Communications, the peer reviewed academic journal of NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence.

He has convened the Masters course Evolution of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency and the International Relations course Transnational Movements, Networks and Revolutionary Strategy. He supervises PhD students researching topics including empathy in international negotiations; trust in the revolutionary theatre; counter-conduct & democratic dissent; materiality of communication in urban space; Cold War metaphor of containment; pedagogy of strategic communications; phenomenology of the information environment; constructing political memory; jazz diplomacy in the Cold War; small state public diplomacy in the Gulf. He was the Teaching Excellence Award Winner 2017.

Much of his career was spent as a television journalist and producer-director at the BBC, ITV, and CBC (Canada). Working in news and current affairs, he specialised as a producer of war zone documentaries, covering conflicts in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Indian subcontinent. Later he created strategic communications campaigns for Britain’s Labour Party; Amnesty International; the African National Congress (ANC)/Anti-Apartheid Movement. He served too as communications advisor to UEFA Champions League football.

His book The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries (Columbia University Press) was published in 2012; 2^nd edition, 2020. It received the CHOICE ‘outstanding academic status award’ 2013. He is writing two books: What is Strategic Communications: Information, Disinformation & The Human Condition; and Unmapping the 21^st Century: Between Networks and the State.

Research Interests

• Strategic Communications – Theory and Practice
• Persuasion and Coercion
• Insurgency and Revolution
• Transnational Movements and Networks
• Imagery and Political Violence

Recent & Current PhD Supervision

• Counter-conduct and resistance in contemporary social movements
• Empathy in international negotiations
• Trust and Revolution
• Urban space and Strategic Communications discourse in Apartheid South Africa
• Metaphor of containment in the Cold War
• Ontology of the Information Environment
• America's Jazz Diplomacy in the Cold War
• Influence Networks in the Caucasus
• Public Diplomacy in Gulf States
• Memory Construction through film in post-war Georgia
• Pedagogy of Strategic Communications
• China's Strategic Communications in Africa through Economics