Dr Duraid Jalili is Senior Lecturer in Environment and Security at the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. His work examines how governments and security officials can better understand, anticipate and respond to non-traditional, systemic and deeply uncertain risks. This includes a core focus on how security leaders learn, think and communicate about environmental crises, their security implications and potential responses.

In practical terms, Duraid spends his time testing different methods for communicating environmental risks to security leaders, in ways that support effective and equitable decision making. He is particularly interested in methods that connect decision makers with evidence that challenges socio-organisational assumptions and path-dependencies. This includes developing and testing exploratory approaches for learning and decision support that help officials engage critically and creatively with deep uncertainty and complexity.

Policy and Advisory Work

Duraid’s policy work connects academic research, educational practice and strategic decision-making. From 2022 to 2026, he served as Senior Academic Advisor to Futures & Force Design (F&FD) within the UK Ministry of Defence (formerly, the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre). In this role, he delivered research support, quality assurance, and strategic guidance on a range of MOD futures, concepts and doctrine, including the landmark Global Strategic Trends (7^th Edition). This included developing and coordinating contributions from external expert networks and testing new mechanisms for enhancing the communications and impact of F&FD products.

Outside of this role, Duraid has contributed to policy and educational reform initiatives for ministries including the MOD, Cabinet Office, FCDO, DESNZ and Defra. He has also delivered written evidence on environmental security for various UK Parliamentary Committees as well as contributing insights to All-Party Parliamentary Groups. Internationally, he has delivered capacity-building activities – including climate security exercises, futures activities and tabletop simulations – for a wide range of government, military, NGO and charitable organisations. He regularly advises international military forces on the development of environmental security and sustainability education for senior officials.

Research

Duraid’s research has two principal strands:

• Environmental security: the characteristics of environmental and resource risks, their security implications (from human and national, to international and planetary levels), and the challenges and opportunities for security officials and institutions to respond effectively and responsibly.
• Defence and security education: how different learning traditions and practices can shape knowledge, beliefs, decision making and spheres of influence amongst elite security officials.

A central concern across both strands is the development of critical and creative thinking practices within security-sector learning. This includes a significant focus on how exploratory approaches to learning – including futures and foresight techniques, serious games, simulations and creative practice – can be used to operate in scenarios of deep uncertainty and complexity, challenge underlying assumptions, and assess possible trade-offs and consequences of different strategic choices.

Duraid’s research has included the development of open-access serious games and facilitator-ready resources for use across higher education, government and security forces. His academic and policy outputs have been used to support educational development initiatives across various governments, as well as being cited in oral evidence for parliamentary committees.

Duraid is Founder and co-Director of the Environmental Security Research Group and the Centre for Military Education at King’s College London. These initiatives bring together academics, practitioners and educators working on areas including environmental security, strategic futures and military education.

Teaching

Duraid teaches across a broad range of security, international relations and research methods subjects for government officials, military officers and civilian professionals. His teaching focuses especially on environmental security and sustainability, futures and foresight, and the thinking and leadership skills required for contemporary leaders facing complex and uncertain risk sets.

He has taught on programmes including Higher, Advanced and Intermediate Command and Staff Courses in the UK Defence Academy, as well as delivering various online Master’s modules and shorter Executive Education (ExecEd) courses. His teaching practice places significant emphasis on collaborative and exploratory learning techniques (including roleplaying, serious gaming, red-teaming, futures techniques, logic models, and structured ideation practices). His supervisory practice includes strong emphasis on helping students to understand and test ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies that sit outside of their traditional comfort zone.

Research interests

• Environmental security and sustainability
• Education and learning in the security sector
• Futures and foresight
• Thinking and decision-making in deep uncertainty
• Soft power and defence diplomacy

Selected Outputs

• Jalili, Briffa & Ryan. 2026. Convergence: Climate Change and Geopolitical Futures. Edinburgh University Press.

This book provides readers with a vocabulary and a framework for assessing climate risk in ways that are both critical and creative. It demonstrates how our approach to climate futures requires us to balance a clear-eyed appraisal of the forces that have produced our present reality with an understanding of the significant potential for radical transformation.

• Jalili. 2026. Security Elites in the Classroom. Studies in the Education of Adults

This article showcases the educational preferences of security elites who attend strategic-level security and defence courses, highlighting the importance of high-quality human resources, contingent constructivist pedagogies, relevant content, freedom of expression, diversity of perspective, suitable academic resources and support mechanisms, and appropriate motivational incentives.

• Jalili (2025) Environmental Insecurity and Modern Conflict. Modern War and Grey Zones. Routledge.

This chapter provides an accessible overview of environmental insecurity for security practitioners. It includes insights on four critical areas: the nature of current and future environmental shifts; governance frameworks and strategic narratives on environmental security; the security implications of global warming and biodiversity loss; and, the implications for armed forces.

• Jalili et al. (2024) Written evidence for the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee Inquiry on ‘Climate Change and Security’. House of Commons.

This written evidence highlights the deep uncertainty surrounding UK climate security and the need for the UK Government to enhance its capacity to operate in this context. It outlines practical recommendations for broadening current understandings of climate risks and engaging in cooperation on climate security.

For a full list of outputs see Dr Jalili's PURE Profile.