That realisation transformed the way I think about conflict - and the work I do today.
Again and again, I saw that wars are not only fought with weapons. They are fought with stories, identities, fear, propaganda and competing narratives. By the time the first bullet is fired, people have often been living inside a battle of ideas for months or even years.
That realisation transformed the way I think about conflict – and the work I do today.
I now spend as much time helping people understand information warfare, disinformation, media literacy and narrative power as I do talking about the conflicts themselves. If we want to understand why wars happen – or how to prevent them – we have to understand the stories that shape the way people think long before violence begins.
Because facts do not speak for themselves.
They are spoken for.
Today’s battlefields are fought not only on the ground. Increasingly they are fought in our minds.