Arthur Snell

Arthur Snell is a writer, podcast host and geopolitical affairs consultant specialising in advice to governments and the private sector on the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, counterterrorism, intelligence matters, and financial crime.

This follows two decades in the Foreign Office during which he served in a range of challenging environments including Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. In 2007, he was appointed Assistant Director for Counter-Terrorism at the Foreign Office, with responsibility for worldwide countering violent extremism (CVE) programmes. From 2010 to 2014, he was Britain’s High Commissioner to the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, based in Port of Spain.

Since leaving the diplomatic service he has combined a career in advisory services with an expanding writing and podcasting portfolio. He is the sole host of the podcast Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell as well as co-host of the Disorder Podcast. In 2022, he published his first book, How Britain Broke the World, a history of British foreign policy from 1997 to 2022. He is currently writing Elemental, an account of the geopolitics of climate change, to be published in the UK in 2026 by Wildfire and in numerous other languages worldwide.