Abstract

This webinar will address issues pertaining to the continued evolutions of extremism in both local and global contexts.

Speakers will address the global jihad (in the form of ISIS and al-Qaeda) from the perspectives of geography and propaganda. The Taliban’s ascendance (indeed victory) in Afghanistan, together with its continued close ties to al-Qaeda, may well be seeing – and seeding – a resurgence of jihadist activity in South Asia (along with transnational linkages), despite Taliban disavowals. The revival of global jihadism may in time prove to be far broader than that, with worrying activity and attacks in Africa and elsewhere. Meanwhile, ISIS, which appeared to be in a state of strategic decline after the fall of Mosul and Raqqa, remains resilient and innovative in the battlefield of the mind.

The possibility of a jihadist revival is of concern; but of equal import are the increasing number of pinpricks (which have nothing to do with Islamist extremism) felt around the world when it comes to attacks based on decentralised extremist thinking (some ideological, many not). Are these in fact the real future of global extremism? Or do all these coalesce in a manner that adds up to pretty much the same thing? This webinar does not offer definitive answers but promises food for thought for academics, practitioners and policymakers concerned with these issues.

About the Panellists

Bill Roggio is a senior fellow at FDD and editor of FDD’s Long War Journal, which provides original reporting and analysis of the Global War on Terror from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, Iran, and beyond. He is also president of the non-profit media company Public Multimedia Inc. Bill was embedded with the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Army, and Iraqi forces in Iraq between 2005 and 2008, and with the Canadian Army in Afghanistan in 2006. From 1991 to 1997, Bill served as a signalman and infantryman in the U.S. Army and New Jersey National Guard. His articles have been published in The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Beast, National Review, and The New York Post, and his work has been in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, Foreign Policy, and Bloomberg.

Charlie Winter is Director of Research at ExTrac, an AI-enabled conflict and communications analytics system that was developed to track violent extremist militancy across the ideological spectrum. For the last decade he has worked in a range of academic positions in the US and UK, researching how and why violent extremists use strategic communication to further their political and military agendas in both on- and off-line spaces. Charlie’s research has been supported by the Global Internet Forum for Counter-Terrorism (GIFCT), Facebook, the UK Home Office, and the US Department for Homeland Security, among others. Besides this, Charlie is an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism and an Associate of the Imperial War Museum Institute in London. He is also member of the RESOLVE Network Research Advisory Council.

Colin P. Clarke, Ph.D., is the Director of Research at The Soufan Group. Clarke’s research focuses on domestic and transnational terrorism, international security, and geopolitics. Prior to joining The Soufan Group, Clarke was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he spent a decade researching terrorism, insurgency, and criminal networks. At RAND, Clarke led studies on ISIS financing, the future of terrorism and transnational crime, and lessons learned from all insurgencies since the end of the World War II. Clarke is also an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) – The Hague, an Associate Fellow at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), and serves on the editorial board of three of the leading scholarly journals in the field of terrorism studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Perspectives on Terrorism.

Clarke has testified before Congress on numerous occasions as an expert witness on a range of terrorism-related issues, appears frequently in the media to discuss national security-related matters, and has published several books on terrorism, including After the Caliphate: The Islamic State and the Future Terrorist Diaspora. In 2011, he spent several months as an analyst with Combined Joint Interagency Task Force-Shafafiyat at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for General H.R. McMaster, the former U.S. National Security Advisor, where he was responsible for analyzing criminal patronage networks in Afghanistan and how these networks fueled the insurgency. Clarke has a Ph.D. in international security policy from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA).