Adam Hanzel, Visiting Fellow (2026)

Adam Hanzel is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Fellow at Metropolitan University Prague, contributing to the EU-GLOCTER project. He holds bachelor's degrees in computational linguistics and Slavic and Eurasian studies, and a master’s degree in Slavic and Eurasian Studies, all completed at the University of Texas at Austin. In light of rapidly shifting international legal and political norms, Adam’s dissertation analyses the trends and policy implications of counter-terrorism legislation in Eurasia from 2000 to the present. His dissertation examines how counter-terrorism policy has developed in the region, the proposed counter-terrorism legislation, and how counter-terrorism is being used as a justification for other legislative and rule-of-law changes.

Adam specialises in mixed methods and interdisciplinary approaches that combine regional expertise and qualitative analysis with natural language processing and machine learning. He has published on radical Russian Orthodox groups in Russia, Russia’s targeted killing program, and Russian hybrid warfare towards regime dissidents. He is currently authoring works on artificial intelligence in the social sciences, knowledge-graph and machine learning in intelligence applications, and lessons learned from targeted killings as they enter a global “gold era.” At ICCT, he will be contributing analyses on violent extremist groups in the region, their global spread, the deterioration of the rule of law in light of counterterrorism legislation, and the pivotal shift from radicalisation to violent, kinetic action, fueled by general artificial intelligence.

Beyond formal publications, he has used his experience in mixed methods to contribute to research labs at the University of Texas at Austin, including the Global Disinformation Lab (GDIL) and the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security in Digital Humanities research group. He is also a member of the International Association for Intelligence Education (IAFIE), the Centre for Security Studies at Metropolitan University Prague, and the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET).