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. Since September 2022, he is also Senior Fellow at Strategic Communications Education and Research Unit (SCERU) at the Graduate School of Public Policy, the University of Tokyo.

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; 2nd edition, 2020. It received the CHOICE ‘outstanding academic status award’ 2013. He is currently writing the book: What is Strategic Communications: Information, Disinformation & The Human Condition.

At SCERU, he will be co-editor for the upcoming Special Issue of Defense Strategic Communications. He will also be giving lectures during Public Seminars, Practitioners’ Seminars and the Strategic Communications course (Autumn 2022) at the University of Tokyo.

Selected Publications

  • The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). CHOICE ‘outstanding academic status award’.
  • Unmapping the 21st century: Between Networks and the State, co-authored with Nicholas Michelsen (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022)
  • ‘Propaganda of the Deed and its Anarchist Origins’, in Nancy Snow, Paul Baines, and Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, (editors), The SAGE Handbook of Propaganda, (London: SAGE, 2019)
  • ‘Strategic Communications in Crisis’, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 15, Issue 4, 2011.
  • ‘The Leak before the Storm: What Wikileaks Tells Us about Modern Communication’, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 155, Issue 4, 2010.
  • ‘Propaganda of the Deed and the Irish Republican Brotherhood: From the politics of ‘Shock and Awe’ to the ‘Imagined Political Community’’, The RUSI Journal , Vol. 153, Issue 1, 2008.
  • ‘Propaganda of the Deed 2008: Understanding the Phenomenon’, co-authored with David Betz & Jaz Azari, RUSI Whitehall Report, No. 3-08, 2008.
  • Strategic Communications and Disinformation in the Early 21st Century, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence, Italy, 2021.
  • Clarifying Digital Terms, edited and co-authored with Elīna Lange-Ionatamišvili, Leonie Haiden, and Julian Hajduk, Riga: NATO StratCom CoE, 2020.
  • Improving NATO Strategic Communications Terminology, edited and co-authored with Leonie Haiden, Riga: NATO StratCom CoE, 2019.
  • How Did The Nordic-Baltic Countries Handle The First Wave of COVID-19?, edited and co-authored with Elīna Lange-Ionatamišvili, Iselin Engebretsen, Miranda Karin, Michélsen Forsgren, and Rakin Sayed, Riga: NATO StratCom CoE, 2021.