Chatham House and Wilton Park: How two British Institutions Helped Shape Foreign Policy and International Dialogue
hosted by Professor
Renaud Dehousse
Christopher Hill & Nicholas Hopkinson
Christopher Hill
Senior Associate Fellow
Nicholas Hopkinson
Widely published writer and speaker on EU and international relations; former Director, Wilton Park, FCDO
This session features SAIS Europe Professor Christopher Hill and Nick Hopkinson, former Director, Wilton Park (the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office's policy forum) and former alumnus to give overviews of their recently published books on two leading UK international affairs institutions: Chatham House - The First Hundred Years (Oxford University Press, 2026) and The Policies and Power of Public Diplomacy - Wilton Park's Road https://www.routledge.com/The-Policies-and-Power-of-Public-Diplomacy-Wilton-Parks-Road/Hopkinson/p/book/9781032831251 (Routledge, 2025). The session will be chaired by SAIS Europe Rector Renaud Dehousse.
Both Chatham House and Wilton Park are widely recognised internationally as important British contributions to, and sometimes models for, international policy-making and dialogue. They were key components of UK ‘soft power' long before Professor Joseph Nye elaborated the concept.
Chris and Nick will reflect on the origins and purpose of both institutions, in Chatham House's case initially to improve international analysis and foreign policy-making in the wake of World War One. Wilton Park was established to ‘re-educate' German officers in the principles of democracy after World War Two as part of Sir Winston Churchill's vision to build a stable post-war Germany. They will discuss the key political and institutional challenges each have faced over the years in the context of UK and global developments. Key highlights and impacts of their programmes and events on policy-making, both in the UK and around the world, will be analysed. Whilst there are many similarities between the two institutions such as their coverage of global challenges and regions, and the off the record nature of their discussions, there are key differences. Chatham House in London has an independent research mandate and is public-facing whereas Wilton Park only produces reports on its events and is more ‘under the radar', in part due to being an arms length governmental agency located in a secluded sixteenth century English country house.
Christopher Hill
Christopher Hill, MA, DPhil (Oxon) is Emeritus Professor of International Relations in the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He is also a Senior Associate Professor at SAIS Bologna, Johns Hopkins University. The first thirty years of his career were spent at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he was the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations between 1991-2004. From 2004-2016 he was the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations at Cambridge. His most recent books are: Chatham House: the First Hundred Years edited with Michael Cox, Alex May and Caroline Soper (2026); International Relations and the European Union, 4th ed., edited with Michael Smith and Sophie Vanhoonacker (2023); The Future of British Foreign Policy: Security and Diplomacy in a World after Brexit (Polity, 2019); Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century (2016); and The National Interest in Question: Foreign Policy in Multicultural Societies (2013). He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2007 and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences since 2025. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the Peloponnese at Corinth in 2015, became an Ufficiale dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia in 2017 and received the Distinguished Contribution Award from the British International Studies Association in 2022. His interests lie mainly in the interplay between domestic and international politics.
Nicholas Hopkinson
During his 23 year career at Wilton Park, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office's policy forum in Steyning, West Sussex, Nick progressed to Director. He pioneered and chaired high level Track II seminars in 25 countries, wrote more than 80 Wilton Park policy reports and edited another 400. Since, he worked with the Commonwealth Secretariat and as a Fellow at Salzburg Global. Nick was active in the campaign to keep the UK in the European Union (EU) including serving as founder Chair of London4Europe and its publications editor and blogger, and giving 30 talks and debates with leading political figures during the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Nick has had many articles, principally on the EU and democracy, published by peer-reviewed academic journals such as The Roundtable Journal of Commonwealth Affairs, Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies (MEDAC) and Brown University; think tanks such as the Foreign Policy Centre and the media such as the New European/World and Financial Times. Among his five published books is Parliamentary democracy: is there a perfect model? (Ashgate/Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, 2001). For four years, Nick was editor and lead author for a major project examining Wilton Park's higher level policy discussions since 1946 resulting in the publication by Routledge in 2025 of The Policies and Power of Public Diplomacy - Wilton Park's Road https://www.routledge.com/The-Policies-and-Power-of-Public-Diplomacy-Wilton-Parks-Road/Hopkinson/p/book/9781032831251
Nick was born in Montreal, Canada and is a dual Canadian-British national. He was awarded a B.A. (Honours) in Politics from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario; a Graduate Diploma in International Studies from the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies (SAIS Europe), Bologna, Italy, and a Masters in International Affairs from Carleton University, Ottawa.
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