Directory

FOUNDER & MANAGING DIRECTOR

Mike founded Craighead Kellas after working on complex sourcing, evidence, and analysis problems for more than twenty years. He sets the company’s strategic direction, leads project design and implementation, and advises clients.

Based in Dubai, he divides his time between the UAE, the UK, Canada, and assignments elsewhere. He maintains a portfolio of professional activities that keep him current with the latest academic research in his field and increasingly immersed in the study of law.

Professional Profile
Mike’s career is defined by his commitment to rule of law programmes and operations around the world. After seven years in early career military service in infantry and other units, he served six years as a civilian NATO official in the Balkans, Europe, and Afghanistan, and two years as a UN Official in Iraq. He spent a decade running a strategic intelligence and political risk consultancy in the UK, undertaking desk and field assignments for British, Canadian, American, and Norwegian government clients.

Working in consortia and with large primes, including BAE, Thales, and PWC, he mobilised project teams and delivered research and analysis that underpinned evidence-led government activities. Among other assignments, Mike advised a federal police war crimes unit in Eastern Europe on its evidence management protocols, managed nation-wide evidence digitization for the distributed counterterrorism judiciary of a Middle Eastern state, and coordinated a diplomatic initiative to preserve and translate the publications of a Southwest Asian state’s former government.

Research & Writing
Mike is a recognized specialist on the geopolitics of information, communications, and the rule of law. Concurrent with his previous consulting practice, he researched and lectured on international relations, organisations, and security at King’s College London, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and University College London. For the last five years, he has been a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, where he founded and directs the Conflict Records Unit. That and his more recent consulting assignments led him to the subject of his next book, The Cipher of Polybius, on the history and law of intelligence, evidence, and consequence, and what they mean today in an AI-first world.

Mike has drafted hundreds of government classified and commercially confidential reports over the course of his career. His public writing has appeared in scholarly, trade, and popular outlets including Foreign Policy, Wired Magazine, CNN, Jane’s Intelligence Review, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Civil Wars, Cultural Survival Quarterly, and others. He is the editor of four previous books, and the author of Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War, 1959-2009, (C. Hurst & Co Publishers & Oxford University Press, 2021).

Mike is an elected fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Royal Historical Society. He holds B.A. and M.A degrees in history, a PhD in political science from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and a Graduate Diploma in Law from Birkbeck College.