GraSPP and Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communications (Sympodium) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a Collaboration Arrangement, effective from June 19, 2024.
Sympodium, founded in 2023 in London, UK, is the leading global institute for Strategic Communications, focusing on its geopolitical dimensions. It is a team of scholars, policymakers, and media practitioners working across the world. Sympodium works with government and civil society strategic communicators to face the most challenging problems across the world.
Strategic Communications now occupies an unprecedentedly important place in international affairs. Defined as the use of words, actions/nonactions, images, and symbols to shape and shift significant discourses in societies, Strategic Communications plays a central role in the promotion of the rule-of-law-based international order. As such, it has emerged as a major subject for education and training in advanced nations across the globe, as well as in international organisations such as the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
There is already a substantial history of collaboration in research and education between GraSPP and Sympodium’s Director Neville Bolt in his previous capacity as Founder-Director of the King’s Centre for Strategic Communications (KCSC) in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
Professor Chiyuki Aoi, GraSPP, has contributed to the postgraduate educational programme that Sympodium Institute runs (accredited inside the EU) with financial and institutional support from the UK government and NATO. She also contributes regularly to NATO’s independent, peer-reviewed academic journal Defence Strategic Communications of the NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence, which is edited by Dr. Bolt.
There is a clear need to promote and strengthen professional and advanced graduate-level research and education in Strategic Communications in the Indo-Pacific, now the most dynamic region in the world of geostrategics as well as geoeconomics.
The development of the strategic collaboration between GraSPP and Sympodium will deepen opportunities for mutual exchange and cooperation. The comprehensive collaboration agreement concluded this time will serve as a catalyst to elevate their interconnection to a new strategic level and advance their mutual objectives.
