Professor Michael Clarke was Director General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) from 2007 to 2015. Previously he was founding Director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College London and also Deputy Vice-Principal.

He has been a Guest Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.  He is now a Fellow of King’s College London and of the Universities of Aberystwyth and Exeter.

He was specialist adviser to the House of Commons Defence Committee from 1997 to 2019, and since 2016 to the Joint National Committee on Security Strategy on which he still serves.  In 2004 he was the UK’s member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. In 2009 he was appointed to the Prime Minister’s National Security Forum, in 2010 to the Chief of Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Group, and in March 2014 the Deputy PM asked him to chair an Independent Surveillance Review.

His recent publications include; Tipping Point: Britain, Brexit and Security in the 2020s (2019); The Challenge of Defending Britain (2018). His next two books in 2021 and 2022, will be: Britain’s Persuaders: Soft Power in a Hard World, and Great British Military Commanders.

Michael is a Hon Member of the Keele World Affairs Advisory Panel.

She has received honours for her work on human rights from the governments of France and Italy and has been awarded more than thirty honorary doctorates