Dr. Matthew Crosston is a Senior Advisor in the Research Institute for European and American Studies (RIEAS) based in Athens, Greece. He specializes in international security, intelligence studies, global leadership and policy change, and equity/justice workshops. He is an acclaimed author and international speaker who consults with governments, media organizations, and academic institutions on a range of issues covering peace mediation, irregular warfare, intelligence dilemmas, and education innovation.
As an academic executive leader, he serves as the Director of Academic Transformation at Bowie State University under the Provost. As a scholar, he serves as Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel and on the Advisory Board of the seminal International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. He is Senior Fellow at the China Eurasia Council for Political and Strategic Research in Nanjing, China, Executive Vice Chairman of ModernDiplomacy.eu, and was the first American invited to conduct a political analysis blog for the Russian International Affairs Council in Moscow, Russia. He advised on the development of two new doctoral programs at St. John’s University and North Carolina State University, in Homeland Security Management and International Security, respectively.
Since receiving his PhD from Brown University in International Relations and Comparative Politics in 2003, Crosston has published top-tier research that has initiated alternative thinking and impacted real world decision-making on policy in the US and beyond. His established work in cyber has made required reading course lists at US CYBERCOM and the US Naval War College; his concept of ‘active cyber defense’ has been openly supported by Israel’s Mossad; the piece ‘Soft Spying’ (industrial/economic espionage) is required reading in courses at the US Army War College; ‘Nemesis’ is highlighted on the journal of record for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Сравнительная Политика; ‘Jihadi Johns,' presented at Oxford University's Internet Institute, modeled a new innovation in utilizing existing data profiling for positive inroads against home-grown radical terrorism. In addition to his peer-reviewed publications, Crosston has over 150 public scholarship pieces that represent the full spectrum of global security in the 21st century, as well as being interviewed by media organizations across Europe, Asia, the Post-Soviet space, and the Middle East.
Forthcoming in 2027 from Routledge will be a new volume, "Countering Hybrid Warfare in Central and Eastern Europe," while he has also been lead editor of two new volumes from Peter Lang Publishing, "Three Centuries of Russian Influence in the Balkans" (2026), and "Old and New Insights on the History of Intelligence and Diplomacy in the Balkans" (2023). From 2022-2025, he continued his diverse research within diplomacy, defense, and strategic culture, with articles on the American and Russian defense dynamic as well as three edited volumes on the history of intelligence and diplomacy in the Balkans from various global affairs perspectives. 2020 saw four new diverse works in highly-ranked peer-reviewed journals, covering cyber colonization, global hegemony, populism, and gendered intelligence. 2018 saw the publication of his newest book, "Russia Reconsidered: Putin, Power, and Pragmatism" from Brown Books, which predetermined the current Ukrainian crisis. For 2017, his piece "Virtual Patriots and a New American Cyber Strategy: Breaking the Zero-Sum Game" (2012), was selected for inclusion in the special 10th anniversary commemorative issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly and his analytical commentary "The Grand Cyber Spy Game: Russia, America, and China Stealing the World One Byte at a Time" was voted the #1 story on Modern Diplomacy for all of 2016. Crosston was named the Outstanding Instructor by the International Association for Intelligence Education (IAFIE) in 2013. In the past few years, he has been invited to speak at such diverse venues as the U.S. Department of State, the Defense Intelligence Agency, US STRATCOM, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the 97th Intelligence Squadron, Oxford University, Creighton University, Rhodes College, the Naval War College at the Naval Postgraduate School, and North Carolina State University, among others. His works overall have been translated into Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, French, Hebrew, Spanish, Turkish, Farsi, Greek, and Uzbek.
He has a BA from Colgate University, MA from the University of London, PhD from Brown University, and completed his Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.