Shaun Riordan

Biography

Shaun Riordan is Director of Research of the Athar Center for Public Diplomacy in Riyadh. He is also a Senior Consultant with UNITAR on Digital and Cyber Diplomacy and a Visiting Fellow of the Charhar Institute (Beijing). Until recently he was Director of the Chair for Diplomacy and Cyberspace at the European Institute of International Studies. Shaun has taught at diplomatic academies in Spain, Armenia, Bulgaria and the Dominican Republic, as well as in the Financial Markets Institute in Madrid. Shaun served as a British diplomat for 16 years, with postings in the UN (New York), Taiwan, China and Spain, as well as the Counter-Terrorism and Yugoslav Departments of the FCO. He is author of “The New Diplomacy” (Polity 2003), “Adios a la Diplomacia” (Siglo XXI 2005), “Cyberdiplomacy: The Management of Security and Governance Online” (Polity 2019) and “The Geopolitics of Cyberspace: A Diplomatic Perspective” (Brill 2019). He is also co-author of “Science Diplomacy, Cyberdiplomacy and Techplomacy in EU-LAC Relations” (Springer 2023) and “Business Diplomacy: A Business Executive´s Guide to an Uncertain World” (Routledge 2026) as well as the T20 policy briefs “The Cyberdiplomacy of Constructing Norms in Cyberspace”, “The Global Governance of Private Cybersecurity Companies” and “Environmental and Ethical Governance in Artificial Intelligence”.