David Patrikarakos

David Patrikarakos
Born	London
Notable work	War in 140 Characters: How social Media is Reshaping conflict in the Twenty-First Century

David Patrikarakos is a British journalist, author and TV producer, best known as the author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. He is also a contributing editor at The Daily Beast and a contributing writer at Politico Europe. In 2014 he was appointed a Poynter Fellow at Yale University and is currently a Non-Resident Fellow in the School of Iranian Studies, at the University of St Andrews.

Background

Patrikarakos was born in Hampstead and attended University College School. He has been described as a British-Greek-Jewish-Iranian-Iraqi. Via his father, he is descended from the Greek revolutionary and statesman Georgios Sisinis while, while his mother’s family tree includes a long line of Sephardi rabbis including Abdallah Somekh, who was instrumental in the codification of kosher laws for Baghdadi Jews throughout India and the Far East, and the master kabbalist and de facto chief Rabbi of Babylon, Yosef Hayyim. Sylvia Kedourie was also a cousin.

Author

After post-graduate studies at Wadham College, Oxford, in 2012 Patrikarakos published Nuclear Iran: Birth of An Atomic State, a full history of Iran's nuclear ambitions. Nuclear Iran was named as a New York Times Editor's Choice and nominated for the 2013 Total Politics Book Awards.

His second book, War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, drew from Patrikarakos' time embedded with forces in the Russian-Ukraine conflict and reporting on the 2014 Hamas-Israel conflict, Operation Protective Edge and ISIS, to explore the increasing role played by social media in modern conflict. It was also the first book to explore the work of Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat, who would gain prominence following the 2018 poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. On its publication in 2018, Patrikarakos' book was widely reviewed in the international press, including by Ben Judah in The Times, who wrote that "War in 140 Characters should be mandatory reading at Sandhurst". In the book, Patrikarakos uses the concept of what he terms Homo Digitalis, the individual that (thanks to the digital revolution, especially social media) is networked, globally connected, and able to wield disproportionate power.

In the military sphere, War in 140 Characters was placed on the reading lists for the Munich Security Conference and the UK's Royal Air Force Centre for Air Power Studies and singled out as essential reading by Admiral Foggo at an October 2018 meeting of the Atlantic Council. In January 2018, the incoming head of UK Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Nick Carter concluded his first major policy speech at Royal United Services Institute by calling on the 77th Brigade to observe the lessons of Patrikarakos' book.

War in 140 Characters is in development for a six-part docu-series with triple-Oscar winner Angus Wall.

Journalist

Patrikarakos started writing on foreign affairs, primarily on Iran, before branching out to cover the Middle East and post-Soviet states more generally, specialising in disinformation. In the course of his career he has written for The New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Spectator, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Prospect, New Statesman, Politico, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Reuters, Mashable, Literary Review, CNN, and The National Interest, among others.