Michael Clarke

Michael Clarke on Channel 4 news

In late September 2007 Professor Michael Clarke was appointed as Director of the Royal United Services Institute in succession to Rear Admiral Richard Cobbold who retired in summer 2007.

According to RUSI:

Professor Clarke is currently Director of Research Development and Deputy Vice Principal at King's College London. His distinguished career in the defence academic field began with a degree in international politics from Aberystwyth University, where he subsequently took an MSc(Econ) in British Defence Policy and served as a researcher in the Department of International Politics. He moved to Manchester University from 1975 to 1979 and then to the Department of Politics at Newcastle where he remained until 1990 when he became the founding Director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College London. He was appointed Professor of Defence Studies at King's in 1995 and took up his present position there in 2005.

Professor Clarke has been a senior Specialist Advisor to the House of Commons Defence Committee since 1997, having served previously with the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. In 2004 he was appointed the UK member of the United Nations Secretary General's Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. He has published extensively on defence and security issues and has lectured at many universities in the United Kingdom, as well as at the Joint Staff College, the Royal College of Defence Studies, the NATO School at Oberammergau and the Clingendael Institute in the Netherlands. He has been a Guest Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a Fellow in British Foreign Policy at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, of whose Council he has been a member since 2004.

Islamic Terrorism Comments

In June 2009, Michael Clarke warned that the threat of Islamic terrorism "would not wither away in the near future: it is likely to be generational." He also stated that the success of police and intelligence operations that had been executed since 2000 had turned British prisons into "universities of terror". He stated that "the security services had done a good job so far in containing a new, home grown threat to public safety and to the UK's chosen way of life ... [but] ... the 90-odd convictions [which have been secured relating to terrorism] ... will have their own longer-term consequences for which the government must be prepared."