Misha Glenny
Boards are being asked to make defensible decisions about exposure they cannot fully see: criminal networks embedded in supply chains, cyber intrusion routed through state actors, sanctions risk that shifts faster than legal opinion. The old separation between security, geopolitics and commercial strategy no longer holds. Leaders need a coherent picture of how these systems actually interact, written by someone who has spent decades inside them.
Misha Glenny is the journalist, author and broadcaster who explains how organised crime, cybercrime and geopolitical disorder converge into a single operating risk for global business, and now hosts BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Misha Glenny
- He treats cybersecurity as a geopolitical and criminal-economy problem, not an IT one, which is the framing senior boards now need.
- McMafia and DarkMarket are built on direct fieldwork with traffickers, money launderers and hackers. The case material is his own, not borrowed from analyst desks.
- As former Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and incoming host of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, he brings institutional weight that few commercial speakers in this category carry.
- He can move between a finance board on sanctions exposure, a security committee on ransomware, and a leadership audience on Russia, China and the fracturing global order, without changing voice.
Biography highlights
- Former BBC Central Europe Correspondent. Reported the 1989 revolutions and the Yugoslav wars.
- Rector, Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna, May 2022 to March 2026.
- Incoming presenter of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, succeeding Melvyn Bragg from January 2026.
- Author of McMafia, DarkMarket, The Balkans 1804 to 2012 and Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio.
- Executive producer of the BBC One and AMC drama series McMafia.
- Sony Radio Academy Award for outstanding contribution to broadcasting. BT Information Security Journalist of the Year.
- Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, teaching Crime in Transition.
Biography
International organised crime is no longer a vice problem on the edge of the economy. It is woven into legitimate supply chains, banking flows and the cyber infrastructure that companies depend on. The argument that organised crime could account for a significant share of global GDP, first set out in McMafia in 2008, has aged into a description that finance, security and policy audiences now treat as a working assumption.
Misha Glenny built that argument on direct reporting. As the BBC’s Central Europe Correspondent through the 1989 revolutions and the Yugoslav wars, he reported the collapse of the old order from inside it. McMafia and the follow-up book DarkMarket took the same method into the criminal economy itself, with sustained fieldwork among traffickers, money launderers and the hackers running early carding forums. The BBC One and AMC drama series of McMafia, which he executive produced, gave the analysis a second life with a much wider audience.
The institutional record matches the reporting. Glenny served as Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna from 2022 to 2026, one of central Europe’s serious advanced research institutions, and held a visiting professorship at Columbia’s Harriman Institute teaching crime in transition. In December 2025 the BBC announced him as the next host of In Our Time, succeeding Melvyn Bragg.
For a leadership audience, the combination is unusual. Few speakers can talk about Russian power, Balkan history, Chinese strategy, ransomware economics and sanctions exposure as a single connected system. Glenny can, because he has spent thirty years reporting it as one.
Key speaking topics
- Geopolitics and global disorder
- Cybersecurity as a board and national risk
- Global organised crime and illicit finance
- Russia, the Balkans and post-Soviet power
- Cryptocurrency, dark markets and the criminal internet
- Critical minerals and the new resource competition
- China, the United States and the contested world order
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees confronting sanctions, cyber and geopolitical exposure together
- CISOs, CROs and general counsel framing cyber and crime risk to the wider business
- Financial services, energy and industrial leadership teams exposed to sanctions, illicit flows and supply chain risk
- Policy, defence and intelligence audiences working at the seam of geopolitics and organised crime
Audience outcomes
- A working model of how organised crime, cybercrime and state power now operate as one system
- A clearer view of where their own sector sits inside that system, from finance to energy to technology
- Specific case material from McMafia and DarkMarket that translates to live risk conversations
- Sharper questions to put to their security, legal and strategy functions on geopolitical exposure
Talks
A board-level account of how cyber threat now functions as an extension of great-power competition and organised crime.
Key takeaways:
- How state, criminal and proxy actors share infrastructure in the cyber domain
- Where boards consistently misread cyber as a technical rather than geopolitical risk
- What a credible board-level response looks like
The argument from McMafia, updated: how illicit economies have continued to integrate with legitimate trade, finance and technology.
Key takeaways:
- The scale of illicit flows and their entanglement with mainstream banking and logistics
- How sanctions regimes are reshaping criminal markets in real time
- What this means for compliance, supply chain and country-risk decisions