Paul Cornish was educated at the University of St Andrews, the London School of Economics, the University of Cambridge and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He served in the British Army (Royal Tank Regiment) and as an arms control analyst in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). He has held senior/professorial appointments in UK research institutes and universities: Chatham House (where he established the institute’s cyber security research project); the UK Defence Academy; the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College London; the RAND Corporation (Europe); and the Universities of Cambridge, Bath and Exeter. His work covers international security, European security and defence, national strategy, cyber security, arms control, the ethics of armed force, and civil-military relations.
Cornish is director of his own consultancy company, Coracle Analysis Ltd and Chief Strategist at Cityforum Public Policy Analysis Ltd, where he leads on UK national strategy and international cyber security. He was a member of the UK Chief of Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel and participated in UK-China Track 1.5 discussions on cyber security and global cyber governance from 2013. He has held several appointments in the field of cyber security policy research: Associate Director, Global Cyber Security Capacity Building Centre, University of Oxford, 2013-18; Principal Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science, University College London, 2015-17 and Professorial Fellow in Cyber Security at the Australian National University’s National Security College in 2017. He is a member of the Cyber Futures Council at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute, Bratislava, a member of the Programme Committee of CYBERSEC, the European Cybersecurity Forum in Kraków, and was designer/director of the Wilton Park Conference, Military Operations in Cyberspace, 5-7 September 2018.
Professor Cornish has published widely in the area of international and European security, arms control, national strategy, civil-military relations, the ethics of the use of armed force, cyber security and cyber governance. His most recent book is 2020: World of War (Hodder & Stoughton, 2017) and he is editor of the Oxford Handbook of Cyber Security, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
Paul Cornish was born in September 1959 and is married with four adult children. His interests include motorcycling, rowing, scuba-diving and playing saxophone.