Rory Cormac

Why organisations work with Rory Cormac

• He brings archival-grade authority on how states actually conduct covert action, drawn from declassified British and allied intelligence records, not commentary or speculation.
• His work on the grey zone gives boards a structured way to read sabotage, subversion and information operations as connected forms of state pressure, not isolated incidents.
• He translates the playbooks of Russian and Chinese covert activity into specific implications for industries exposed to critical infrastructure, supply chains and intellectual property.
• How to Stage a Coup (Atlantic, 2022) is one of the few mainstream studies of secret statecraft to be taken seriously by both academic intelligence scholars and practitioners.
• Fakers (Oxford University Press, 2026) reads the British Cold War forgery operations as a working playbook for present-day state disinformation, giving leaders a historical pattern they can apply to current incidents.
• He has given oral evidence on foreign interference to parliamentary inquiries in both the UK and Australia, and has fronted three Channel 4 documentaries with Richard Aldrich on intelligence and the British state, making him equally credible in front of policy committees, expert rooms and public audiences.

Biography highlights

• Professor of International Relations and lead for security and resilience research at the University of Nottingham, specialising in secret intelligence and covert action.
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; previous Leverhulme and AHRC Fellowships.
• Author of Fakers (Oxford University Press, 2026) on state disinformation, How to Stage a Coup (Atlantic, 2022), Disrupt and Deny (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Confronting the Colonies (Hurst, 2014).
• Co-author with Richard J. Aldrich of The Black Door and The Secret Royals: Spying and the Crown from Victoria to Diana (Atlantic, 2021).
• Co-presenter of three Channel 4 documentaries: Spying on the Royals, D-Day: The King who Fooled Hitler, The Queen and the Coup.
• Has given oral evidence on foreign interference to parliamentary inquiries in the UK and Australia, with regular appearances across national press, radio and television on intelligence matters.

Biography

Most boards still treat espionage as a film genre. The pipeline interruption, the leaked tender, the social media campaign that crashes a launch, the supplier suddenly entangled in a sanctions investigation: these are read as separate operational problems, not as connected acts of state pressure. The work of Rory Cormac, Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, is to give senior leaders the language and the historical pattern recognition to see them as one problem.

Cormac is Professor of International Relations and lead for security and resilience research at the University of Nottingham, specialising in covert action and secret statecraft. His authority is built on archival research into declassified British and allied records, the basis of Disrupt and Deny (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Confronting the Colonies (Hurst, 2014). With Richard J. Aldrich he co-authored The Black Door and The Secret Royals, broadening that material into a wider reading of how states use the hidden hand.

How to Stage a Coup (Atlantic, 2022) brought the argument into the present. Eleven lessons drawn from a century of secret statecraft, applied to a world of sabotage, ambiguous warfare and adversaries operating just below the threshold of open conflict. Fakers (Oxford University Press, 2026) extends the work into disinformation directly, using the declassified history of Britain’s Cold War forgery operations to read the mechanics of present-day state influence campaigns. Both books sit at the centre of current debates on the grey zone among scholars and practitioners alike.

Beyond the academy he is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a former Leverhulme and AHRC Fellow, and a co-presenter with Aldrich of three Channel 4 documentaries on intelligence and the British state. He has also given oral evidence to parliamentary inquiries on foreign interference in both the UK and Australia. The result is a speaker who can hold a room of historians, a corporate security committee, and a Hay Festival audience using the same material.

Key speaking topics

• Covert action and secret statecraft
• Grey-zone conflict and hybrid threats
• Russian and Chinese subversion
• Disinformation and information warfare
• Intelligence history and the modern state
• Political risk for critical infrastructure and IP-heavy sectors
• Resilience against sabotage and infiltration

Ideal for

• Boards and risk committees in defence, energy, telecoms and critical infrastructure
• Chief security officers, heads of corporate intelligence and political risk leads
• Government, military and policy audiences working on national resilience
• Industry associations and conferences focused on geopolitical exposure

Audience outcomes

• A clearer reading of how state adversaries combine sabotage, subversion and disinformation against commercial targets
• A working vocabulary for the grey zone that makes specific incidents legible as part of a larger pattern
• A historically grounded view of Russian and Chinese covert practice, rather than headline impressions
• Sharper questions for security, communications and supply-chain teams about where the organisation is exposed
• A sense of where the boundary sits between state interference and ordinary commercial risk