Rod Thornton is a Senior Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department of Kings College London. He previously taught at the University of Kurdistan Hewler in Erbil, Iraq and in the University of Nottingham's department of Politics and International Relations. He was suspended from the University of Nottingham in spring 2011 after publishing an article critical of the University's handling of the arrest of one of its students. He subsequently left the university by "mutual agreement" with the university.