USC CREATE: Recent Trends in Global Neo-Jihadi Terrorism in the West

The lecture will touch on three topics:
• A survey of all the global neo-jihadi plots in the West since 9/11/01 in order to detect the emerging trends
• A summary of new insights in the process of turning to political violence coming from recent empirical research
• A summary of how the Internet is affected the evolution of the global neo-Jihadi threat in the West
The talk will conclude with the implication of the new developments in the Middle East on the global neo-Jihadi threat in the West.

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Marc Sageman is an independent researcher on terrorism and the founder of Sageman Consulting, LLC. He is now the special advisor to the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence on the "insider threat." He was the New York Police Department's first "scholar in residence" and adjunct associate professor at the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is director of research at ARTIS.

After graduating from Harvard, he obtained an M.D. and a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University. After a tour as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1984. He spent a year on the Afghan Task Force then went to Islamabad from 1987 to 1989, where he ran U.S. unilateral programs with the Afghan Mujahedin. In 1991, he returned to medicine and completed a residency in psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1994, he has been in the private practice of forensic and clinical psychiatry, and taught law and psychiatry, the social psychology of terrorism, and mass murderers at the University of Pennsylvania.

After 9/11/01, he started building a terrorist database to test the validity of the conventional wisdom on terrorism. This research has been published as Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press 2004). He continued this research, and showed how the global neo-jihadi terrorist threat to the West evolved over time. His book Leaderless Jihad describes how the process of radicalization in a hostile environment and enabled by the Internet is evolving into a disconnected network, a Leaderless Jihad. Since then, he has focused on the process of radicalization among young Western Muslims that lead them to political violence using transcripts of terrorism trials and personal interviews.

Sageman may be the only individual to have testified before both the 9/11 Commission in the U.S. and the Beslan Commission in Russia. He has extensively consulted with most national security agencies in the U.S., including the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the National Laboratories, the Department of Homeland Security, various agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community, the U.S. Secret Service, and various other law enforcement agencies.

He has lectured at many U.S. universities, including Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, the Johns Hopkins University... and many universities abroad.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Jihad
• Jihadi
• Global Neo-Jihadi Terrorism
• Marc Sageman
• CREATE
• USC
• Terrorism
• 9/11 Commission
• Erroll Southers
• Stephen Hora