David Kilcullen is a bestselling author and scholar, and a former professional soldier and diplomat. He is Chairman of Caerus Global Solutions, a strategic research and design consultancy based in Washington DC and of First Mile GEO, a geospatial analysis start-up that works with communities in disaster and conflict-affected areas to create participative maps that guide humanitarian assistance efforts. Before founding Caerus, he served 25 years as a light infantry officer in the Australian Army, then with the U.S. State Department, where he was chief strategist in the Counterterrorism Bureau, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, and then Senior Advisor for Counterinsurgency to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

He advises world institutions, governments, businesses, NGOs and local communities across the globe, while working on complex humanitarian and security challenges in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Sri Lanka, Colombia and elsewhere. Foreign Policy named him as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009.

Dave is the author of the Washington Post bestseller The Accidental Guerrilla (2009), Counterinsurgency (2010), and Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla, which won the 2013 PROSE award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Government and Politics.

In his third book, Dave takes us away from the remote, rural guerrilla warfare of Afghanistan, and into the marginalised slums and complex security threats of the world’s coastal cities.