Dr Mohammed Afzal Ashraf

Dr Afzal Ashraf is a practitioner-scholar of international relations and security whose courses blend practitioner experience with rigorous academic method. A former senior Royal Air Force officer, he worked across Cold War deterrence, humanitarian relief, and the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns before leading the RAF’s training enterprise for a global workforce. He later advised UK government decision-makers at the highest levels and collaborated with international partners on counter-insurgency, policing, and security-sector reform. Alongside this, he has consulted on cyber security, risk, and organisational transformation, and served as a Consultant Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute delivering strategy and diplomacy training in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

What this means for Cambridge PACE students is a distinctive learning experience: theory tested against reality. Dr Ashraf can teach international relations, intelligence, influence, and contemporary conflict with a toolkit built for professionals: decision-games, red-teaming, and structured debates so that complex problems become actionable plans. Sessions typically combine short, accessible frameworks with rich case studies (from hybrid warfare and disinformation to sanctions, supply chains, and statecraft), followed by small-group work that pressures ideas and reveals practical constraints. Students leave with clear mental models, a shared vocabulary for inter-agency coordination and habits that improve judgement under uncertainty.

He especially enjoys teaching adult learners because they bring lived experience, challenge assumptions, and value time well spent. His classroom ethos is inclusive, dialogic, and exacting: evidence over assertion, civility over point-scoring, and synthesis over siloed thinking. Expect probing questions, generous feedback, and a premium on clarity - what does this concept explain, where does it fail, and how would we know? He takes particular care to translate research into practitioner-friendly knowledge and to help students connect course material to their professional contexts, whether in the public sector, private sector risk roles, NGOs, or the armed forces.

Dr Ashraf is a Chartered Engineer and holds a PhD in International Relations. His writing has appeared in academic and policy outlets, and he is a frequent commentator on current affairs across international media. Current interests include cyber/AI and national security, the geopolitics of genocide, and why campaigns succeed or fail. Above all, he values learning as a cooperative craft: diverse perspectives, disciplined methods, and the courage to revise one’s view when the evidence demands it.

Dr Ashraf currently teaches International Relations and Security at Loughborough University (currently ranked number 6 in the UK).  He will be teaching an online foundational course on International Relations for PACE and will teach courses for the Cambridge University’s International Summer Programme on International Relations in the Twentieth Century and on The Rise of Corporate Intelligence: Protection and Profit.