Visiting Research Fellow Kings College London
Dr Mike Martin is a former British Army officer trained to fluency in Pushtu who pioneered, designed and implemented the British Military’s Cultural Advisor programme (profiled here in The Sunday Times). This programme took Pushtu-speaking British officers and trained them to build relationships with local national notables and then leverage those relationships to understand and influence the society in which the UK military was operating. During this period, he also worked as an advisor to four commanders of the UK’s Task Force Helmand, advising them on local national population dynamics.
He subsequently read for his PhD at War Studies (his undergraduate degree was Biological Sciences at Oxford). He wrote an oral history of the conflict in Helmand province, Afghanistan from 1978-2012, which he later turned into a critically-acclaimed book, An Intimate War (published by Hurst/OUP). An Intimate War tells the story of thirty-five years of conflict in Helmand Province, Afghanistan as seen through the eyes of the Helmandis and describes how the UK and the US completely failed to understand the socio-political environment in Afghanistan.
Since leaving the army in 2012, Mike worked in Somaliland and Burma/Myanmar for a risk management company as Research Director. There, he set up a new division for the company that focussed on helping multinational clients understand and navigate the social, political and cultural environments in emerging markets and develop and hence develop the requisite strategy. He later worked for two years in a senior management position in a global NGO: Common Purpose. In-between times, he conducted the first crossing of the Congo River basin by LandRover since the 1960s. This journey forms the basis for his second book, Crossing the Congo.
Mike is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, where he is conducing research into the evolutionary psychology of warfare in humans. This forms the basis for his third book, entitled Why We Fight, published in 2018.
Additional Info TwitterUpdated 6/2018
