Biography
Tom Maguire is a Visiting Fellow with the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London (KCL), and Assistant Professor of Intelligence and Security in the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University.
Prior to joining Leiden, Tom taught in KCL's Department of War Studies and was a Research Fellow at Darwin College and the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD thesis at POLIS and Gonville & Caius College and was awarded the Lisa Smirl Prize for best thesis.
Tom's research streams are two-fold. Firstly, he is interested in interactions between intelligence and propaganda in international politics, especially examining covert influence and intelligence disclosures as policy tools. This forms the basis for a forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, The intelligence-propaganda nexus: British and American covert action in Cold War Southeast Asia. It is also the thematic focus for a Dutch Government-funded research project, ‘Sharing Secrets’, for which Tom is the Principal Investigator. This examines state decision-making behind disclosing intelligence to influence external audiences. Secondly, Tom is interested in the politics and impacts of international security cooperation, in particular exploring post-colonial security relationships between states in Africa and Asia and the United Kingdom during the Cold War and so-called Global War on Terror.
At Leiden, Tom convenes courses for both the undergraduate Minor in Intelligence Studies and the Intelligence & National Security track of the MSc in Crisis and Security Management. He also convenes a triannual intelligence and security forum with the Netherlands Defence Academy and remains a co-convenor of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar and a lecturer on the Cambridge-KCL International Security and Intelligence programme.
Tom was formerly the John Garnett Visiting Fellow within the National Security & Resilience Studies programme at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), a defence and security think tank on Whitehall, focusing on conflict, violent extremism, and organised crime in East Africa. He holds a BA (Hons.) in History from Durham University and an MPhil in International Relations at POLIS.