Joan Phillips

Joan Phillips, is a pseudonym used by Joan Hoey, an associate of the LM group. She wrote a series of articles for LM Magazine throughout the 1990s denying Serb nationalist atrocities. She was director of the London International Research Exchange [1] and has worked as the Economist Intelligence Unit's Balkans analyst.

Phillips is sister of former Labour minister Kate Hoey, whose views on Ireland are strongly unionist.

Latterly Hoey turned up as an associate of the Centre for Defence & International Security Studies, at Lancaster University. The Institute is described by Charlie Pottins:

another interesting part of the CDISS is a programme on "revolutionary warfare and counter-insurgency". In my day blimps and "Daily Telegraph " readers would have had a fit if someone told them Lancaster had fostered a department teaching "revolutionary warfare"'! But times change, and this programme aims " to identify the successes and failures of strategies and tactics deployed against revolutionaries and terrorists by democratic states and to make recommendations for both the present and the future".

The programme is headed by Colonel Richard Cousens, former Director of Defence Studies for the British Army, described as "a Counter Revolutionary Warfare specialist with practical experience as an infantry officer. He completed seven operational tours in Northern Ireland with the Light Infantry and served in Hong Kong and Brunei with the Gurkhas. He led the Counter Insurgency instructional team at the British Army Staff College and has studied the relationship between Peacekeeping and Counter Revolutionary Warfare theory. He has had command experience in the counter insurgency environment as a platoon, company and battalion commander."

All of this must make him just the man to impress one of the Centre's associates, Joan Hoey, of the Economist Intelligence Unit.. As "Joan Philips" she was a leading member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, "Living Marxism's Balkan expert (who ridiculed the idea that Serb nationalists had massacred thousands of people), and secretary of the RCP's front Campaign Against Militarism. Unfortunately the list of members and associates seems to have disappeared from the CDSS website, but when I last saw it, most of her fellow associates appeared to be former NATO and allied military personnel. Hoey and her comrades used to sneer at "laptop bombardiers". Now she can rub shoulders happily with real brigadiers.

In 2004 CDISS moved to Henley on Thames. Hoey is no longer mentioned on its website (January 2006).

Her biography on the website of the Economist Intelligence Unit notes

Joan Hoey is a senior analyst in the Eastern Europe team in London. She is responsible for covering political and economic developements in Romania, but has a wider interest in the former communist Balkans, especially Romania, Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia. Before joining the Economist Intelligence Unit in 1995, Joan worked as a freelance journalist and analyst covering Eastern Europe. She was a Senior Research Associate for the Russia, Eastern Europe and Balkans research programme at the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies at Lancaster University in 1994-95.

Contact details

The Court House, Northfield End, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire RG9 2JNTel: +44 (0) 1491 843134Fax: +44 (0) 1491 412082 Email: info@cdiss.orgInternet: http://www.cdiss.org/