Ben O'Loughlin

Ben O'Loughlin is Professor of International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Director of the New Political Communication Unit, which was launched in 2007. Before joining Royal Holloway in September 2006 he was a researcher on the ESRC New Security Challenges Programme. He completed a DPhil in Politics at New College, Oxford in October 2005 under the supervision of the political theorist Elizabeth Frazer and journalist Godfrey Hodgson.

Ben's expertise is in the field of international political communication. He was Specialist Adviser to the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Soft Power and UK Influence, producing the report Power and Persuasion in the Modern World (2014). The report drew extensively on O'Loughlin's work on strategic narrative and has impacted how policymakers communicate Britain's role in the world.

The concept 'strategic narrative' has been developed by Ben with colleagues Alister Miskimmon (Queen's University Belfast), Andreas Antoniades (University of Sussex) and Laura Roselle at Elon University. Strategic narratives refer to how political actors tell stories about the past, present and future of international affairs in order to influence the behaviour of states and non-state actors. Ben and colleagues' book Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order was published by Routledge in New York in November 2013 and won Best Book Award for International Communication at the 2016 International Studies Association convention. Together with Miskimmon and Roselle, in 2017 Ben published an edited volume of strategic narrative studies Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations with University of Michigan Press. From 2016-20 he ran projects examining the impact of culture and narratives on conflicts in Ukraine, Egypt and Israel-Palestine.

Ben was Thinker in Residence at the Royal Academy, Brussels, in 2019-20. With Anja Bechmann he published a report Disinformation and Democracy.