Our Network

Dr David Roberts is the founder and director of the Subsurface Centre and Head of the King's Institute for Applied Security Studies (KIASS) at King's College London, where he leads research on defence, security, and strategic competition. Previously, he directed the Gulf office of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. He has decades of experience in industry consultancy, providing evidence to parliamentary committees, and he has written for the Financial Times, Guardian, and BBC. He is the editor of Cambridge University Press's Elements in Middle East Politics series and the author of two monographs, with articles in International Affairs, Security Studies, and Survival.

Professor Mohammed Abdel-Haq is Senior Associate at the Subsurface Centre and Professor of Banking at the University of Greater Manchester, where he founded the Centre for Islamic Finance and serves as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Postgraduate Development. His career spans twenty-five years in international banking, with managing director and chief executive roles at HSBC Amanah, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, and ABN AMRO. He founded Oakstone Merchant Bank, securing FCA authorisation. He has advised HM Treasury as a member of the UK Government Islamic Finance Task Force and served on the Council of Chatham House from 2011 to 2014. He holds a PhD from Oxford Brookes University.

Andrew Cheatham is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Subsurface Centre. He brings over twenty years of experience spanning law, security, and strategic affairs across the United Nations system, U.S. and UK government, multilateral institutions, and private-sector risk analysis. He is currently a Senior Security Analyst at Global Guardian and a practicing lawyer admitted in New York and Washington, DC. Previously, he served as Senior Advisor at the United States Institute of Peace, leading its Disruptive Technologies Program on AI and emerging threats. Before that, he spent more than a decade with the United Nations, including field assignments in Iraq, Libya, and Somalia, working on constitutional law, post-conflict reconstruction, and coalition stabilisation — including as planning advisor for the 82-country Global Coalition Against Daesh. Andrew is an Adjunct Professor at Boston University, a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the King's Institute for Applied Security Studies, and holds an MA in War Studies from King's College London and a JD from CUNY School of Law.