Ilan recently attained a Master’s degree in Communications from Tel Aviv University. His thesis examined the manner in which foreign ministries use digital diplomacy in order to portray foreign countries during times of international crises. Ilan’s research on ‘Selfie Diplomacy’ – that is the way in which nations use social media in ‘nation branding’ activities – appears in the recently published Digital Diplomacy: Theory and Practice (Routledge).

Current research projects include a cross-national comparison of social media engagement among foreign ministries, a cross-national evaluation of digital diplomacy models adopted by European foreign ministries and an analysis of how digital diplomacy may be used as a tool for symbolic violence in diplomacy. He is a contributor to the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy Blog and the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Jewish Daily Forward and Times of Israel newspapers. Ilan blogs on issues relating to digital diplomacy at http://www.digdipblog.com

With peers from other departments, he has  launched OxERN- the Oxford Extremism Research Network. The network hosts  seminar series on the manner in which extremism can be understood from various academic perspectives