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Location: King’s College London Strand Campus
Date: Wednesday 18th February 2026, 18:30
This event was hosted in collaboration with KCL Diplomacy Society and King’s Intelligence and Security Society. Session moderated by Alexander Anderson, Director at CISES.
European defence has entered a period of structural uncertainty. The war in Ukraine, US volatility, and industrial capacity constraints are forcing European governments to confront hard questions about deterrence, readiness, and political cohesion.
The theoretical debate about “strategic autonomy” is behind us. The conversation is now about force posture, fiscal trade-offs, alliance management, and diplomatic credibility under sustained geopolitical pressure.
Against this backdrop, we convened for an in-person discussion bringing together senior practitioners and analysts working across defence policy and international security.
Panelists
Luc Raynal
Luc Raynal is a Rear Admiral (Vice-amiral) and the Defence Attaché at the French Embassy in the United Kingdom, serving as a senior French defense official with deep expertise in international military cooperation and strategic defense policy. In his current role, he oversees Franco-British defense relations across strategic, industrial, operational, and human domains.
From 2022 to 2024, he headed the Euro-Atlantic Directorate at France’s Joint Staff Headquarters, where he directed military cooperation with NATO and partner nations and contributed to support initiatives for Ukraine. Prior to this, from 2020 to 2022, he served in the Office of the Chief of Staff of the French Navy, coordinating inter-ministerial engagement, strategic communication, and public relations for the Navy.
Paul Mason
Paul Mason is a British journalist, author, and commentator known for his influential work on economics, global crises, and political change. He rose to prominence as Business Correspondent and later Economics Editor for BBC Newsnight, where he became one of the UK’s leading voices during the 2008 financial crisis. He later joined Channel 4 News as Culture and Digital Editor, becoming its Economics Editor in 2014.
Currently, Mason is a fellow at the Council of Geostrategy and writes regular columns for The New European, Social Europe, and Frankfurter Rundschau, contributing analysis on democracy, inequality, digital transformation, and geopolitical trends. He is also a widely read author of major nonfiction works, including Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere’, “Postcapitalism’, “Clear Bright Future’, and ‘How to Stop Fascism’.
Dr Ursula Woolley
Dr Ursula Woolley holds a PhD from the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where she explored how Ukrainians respond to Russian historical propaganda. She also holds a MRes from UCL and previously studied at University of Cambridge and in Moscow. Her academic path includes roles as a visiting researcher with the EUTIM programme and as a graduate research fellow at the European University Viadrina.
Before academia, she spent fourteen years with the British Council and later served in local politics in Islington. She went on to lead Pushkin House as Director and now chairs the Ukrainian Institute London. Her career brings together scholarship, cultural leadership, and public service, making her a distinctive and influential voice on the region.
Georgios Tsialas
Georgios Tsialas is a political scientist specializing in crisis politics, securitization, blame attribution, public opinion, and mixed-methods research. His PhD focuses on developing a cross-level analytical model of framing contests in crisis management.
He holds a BA from Panteion University (with an exchange semester at Sciences Po Lille) and an MSc in Comparative Politics from LSE. He is currently a PhD candidate in Politics, affiliated with both the Department of European and International Studies and the Policy Institute.
Professionally, he has worked as a senior political analyst and editor at the Association of International and European Affairs (OAEO), producing analyses on EU politics, China, Latin America, and political sociology. From 2023 to 2025, he served as a Research Assistant at the LSE Hellenic Observatory.
Tea Tutberidze
Tea Tutberidze is a PhD candidate in War Studies at King’s College London, combining deep academic insight with significant real-world experience in democratic activism. She lectured at top Georgian institutions, including Tbilisi State University and lia State University.
She played an influential role in Georgia’s democratic movement as a co-founder of the youth organisation Kmara, a driving force behind the Rose Revolution, and through her work at the Liberty Institute, where she actively advocated for major pro-democracy reforms and engaged in national political debates.
Her doctoral research offers a rare, interview-driven comparison of democratisation across Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, revealing why some post-Soviet states consolidated democracy while others have struggled, and assessing the impact of Western involvement throughout these transitions.