Professional appointments
2023-: Associate professor, Institute for Strategy and War Studies, Royal Danish Defence College.
Research projects:
- Nordic Defence Cooperation
- Special operations in the Nordic Theatre
- Great power competition and proxy wars
2019-2023: Assistant professor, Institute for Strategy and War Studies, Royal Danish Defence College.
Research projects:
- The strategy of small states
- Special operations
- Military stabilization operations
2018-2021: Political advisor, Combined Special Operations Component Command, NATO Reaction Force.
2014-2018: Lecturer, Institute for Strategy and War Studies, Royal Danish Defence College.
Guest researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School, Defense Analysis Department, Monterey, 2016.
2009-2014: Lecturer, Royal Air Force Academy
Selected list of publications
(2025, edited together with David Vestenskov) Militære stabliseringsindsatser: En introduction til koncept,
erfaringer og fremtid. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag.
(2024) Great power competition, proxy war and special operations forces in Kiras & Kitzen (eds) Into the
void: special operations forces after the war on terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(2024, with Peter Viggo Jakobsen) Success defying all expectations: How and why limited use of force
helped to end Somali piracy, Journal of Strategic Studies, 47:2, 263–287.
(2023) The proliferation of security actors in the Sahel: the interplay between international regime complexity
and local emergence in Mandrup & Vrey (eds.): Security governance in Africa: responding to ungoverned
African spaces: emergent thought, new spaces and responses, African Sun Press.
(2022) Small State Strategy in Practice: The Formulation and Execution of Danish Theories of Success in the
United Nations Security Council, 2005–2006. Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, 5(1), pp. 129–142.
(2022, with Christian Høj Hansen), Whose proxy war? The competition among Iranian foreign policy elites
in Iraq, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 33:6, 973-998.
(2022) Western intervention and informal politics: simulated statebuilding and failed reforms. London: Routledge.
(2021) The crafting of alliance cohesion among insurgents: The case of al-Qaeda affiliated groups in the Sa-hel region, Contemporary Security Policy, 42:3, 371-390.
(2021) Frogmen and pirates: the utility of special operations forces for small states against for-profit, illicit networks, Defence Studies, 21:3, 292-311.
(2020, with Line Engbo Gissel) Non-Cooperation with the International Criminal Court in Gatekeeper States: Regime Security in Deby’s Chad, Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
(2019), Dare to Know: The Problem of Overcoming Information Asymmetry in Military Assistance Operations, Special Operations Journal 5(2), 162-178.