John Bew CMG is Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is an internationally recognised scholar and award-winning author who has served at the highest levels of the British government, working across the political aisle. He was the penholder on the last three UK national security strategies and was closely involved in the shaping of the most recent NATO Strategic Concept. In 2025 he was appointed Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George for his services to British foreign policy.

Bew is the author of five books, including Realpolitik: A History, Castlereagh: A Life, and many academic articles and edited collections. His best-known work is his biography of Clement Attlee, Citizen Clem, which won three national awards, including the prestigious Orwell Prize. In 2012, he became the youngest ever holder of the Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Library of Congress and in 2015 he won the Philip Leverhulme Prize for International Studies. He is currently a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, senior advisor at the Australian College of National Security and fellow of the Royal Historical Society. At King’s, he plays a leading role in the new Centre for Statecraft and National Security, which is part of the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy.

Government service

Professor Bew’s involvement in policy work began as a specialist advisor to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. In 2019, he joined No10 Downing Street as Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister, initially working out of the Policy Unit. He held that position for over five years and through successive administrations, making him one of the longest serving and most senior advisors in Downing Street. Uniquely for a No10 appointee, he served through two general elections and for four Prime Ministers, working through the transition to a new government before making his long-planned return to academia in October 2024.

In 2025, Bew was re-appointed by the Labour government again to lead work on National Security Strategy 2025: Security for the British people in a dangerous world. Before that, he led the No10 team which produced the Integrated Review of Foreign Policy, Defence and Security in 2021 and the Integrated Review Refresh of 2023. He also served as the UK's official representative in the NATO Secretary General's Reflections Group, a year-long project which provided recommendations for NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept.

As the chief foreign policy advisor in No10 for more than half a decade, Bew was intimately involved in the key decisions on UK national security policy in this period, from projects such as AUKUS and Global Combat Air Programme to advising on UK policy before and after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He travelled with and on behalf of the Prime Minister, attending successive summits and meetings of the UN General Assembly, NATO, G7 and G20.

Under the Keir Starmer government, Bew led negotiations on the 100-Year Partnership between the UK and Ukraine and was closely involved in the October 2024 Trinity House Agreement between the UK and Germany. Before that, under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, he was instrumental in transforming the Joint Expeditionary Force into an annual Leader's Summit, championed the UK offer of bridging security guarantees for Sweden and Finland before their accession to NATO and worked closely on the UK's ten-year security agreement with Ukraine, the first of its kind in the G7. He also played a central role in several other international agreements over this period, including: the 2021 New Atlantic Charter; 2023 Atlantic Declaration for a Twenty-First Century US-UK Economic Partnership; UK-Japan Hiroshima Accord and UK-South Korea Downing Street Accord. A native of Northern Ireland, Bew was intimately involved in the negotiation of the Windsor Framework with the EU and the subsequent restoration of devolved institutions in Northern Ireland, via the Strengthening the Union deal announced in January 2024.

Academic career

Professor Bew began his academic career in Cambridge University where he studied at Pembroke College. He took a first-class BA in History and won several scholarships for his undergraduate and postgraduate study, coming top in his year and winning the History Faculty Prize for his MPhil dissertation. He completed his PhD at Pembroke before taking up a position as Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse, going on to become College Lecturer and Director of Studies. In 2010, he joined the War Studies Department as a Lecturer, becoming full Professor in 2015.

Bew edited several classic works of political theory before his first monograph, The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth Century Belfast, was published by the Royal Irish Academy in 2009. His second book was a co-written work called Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, published by Columbia University Press. In 2011, his acclaimed biography of Lord Castlereagh was named a book of the year in the Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement and The Spectator and became the basis of a BBC documentary. In 2016, following his time as the Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the John W. Kluge Center at the US Library of Congress, his fourth book, Realpolitik: A History, was published by Oxford University Press.

Bew’s fifth book and best-known work, Citizen Clem: A Life of Attlee (Riverrun and Oxford University Press), won three national awards in 2016: the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, Elizabeth Longford Prize for Biography and best non-fiction book in the Parliamentary Book Awards. It was also named book of the year in The Times, Sunday Times, New Statesman, The Spectator and Evening Standard.

Bew has lectured at distinguished institutions around the world, including keynote speeches at the British International Studies Association, Sorbonne and Library of Congress. His writing has appeared in many international outlets. He was a contributing writer at the New Statesman for over a decade and currently writes or reviews for the Sunday Times, Observer, Times Literary Supplement and Wall Street Journal.

Since joining King’s, he has received a several academic rewards and major grants. In 2014, he held a Leverhulme Trust Scholarship and in 2015 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Politics and International Studies, which “recognises the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising”. In 2017, he won a major Leverhulme grant to support a doctoral training programme on the subject of World Order, alongside Dr. Maeve Ryan. He leads a series of projects at King’s supported by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit on statecraft, diplomacy and applied history. He has served on the advisory board for several academic journals and is a member of a distinguished professional bodies such as the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Authors and European Council of Foreign Relations. His work was the subject of an impact case study as part of the last Research Excellence Framework.

Current Research Interests

Professor Bew’s most recent publications include chapters in The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars, Oxford Handbook on Reinold Niebuhr and Princeton’s Makers of Modern Strategy. In 2021, he also arranged for the first ever publication of Henry Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis, The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant with Stolpe Press. He is currently interested in theories of historical change, statecraft and ideas of international order. He is editing a second volume of Classics in Applied History and is under contract with Allen Lane for an intellectual history of the concept of world order.

Teaching and supervision

As well as contributing to several classes across the War Studies Department, Professor Bew is the creator and convenor of two modules, at undergraduate and postgraduate level. The first is a BA3 on Foreign Policy and National Security since the end of the Cold War. The second is an MA module on Grand Strategy: From Theory to Practice in the Making of National Security. He has supervised more than 15 doctoral students to successful completion. He currently has a full complement of PhD students and will only consider further applications in the most exceptional of circumstances.