Daniel Koehler
Daniel Koehler is the founding Director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies (GIRDS), Fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism and Editor in Chief of the JD Journal for Deradicalization. He also advises the Ministry of the Interior in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, on guiding the state-wide CVE activities. Daniel has long practical experience in deradicalisation counselling and program design. He recently published his first two monographs: Understanding Deradicalization: Methods, Tools and Programs for Countering Violent Extremism (2017) and Right-Wing Terrorism in the 21st Century: The ‘National Socialist Underground’ and the History of Terror from the Far-Right in Germany (2017) with Routledge. In 2016, he was appointed to be the first court expert on deradicalisation in the United States of America at the Federal District Court Minneapolis, where he gave witness on individual defenders to inform the sentencing process and trained probation officers, as well as other federal agents, in CVE coordination. As a co-founder of the Mothers for Life network, the only global family network of parents affected by violent extremist radicalisation, he is very active in building innovative CVE structures around the world. His research focuses on quality standards in deradicalisation/CVE, family counselling, CVE as counter-terrorism, and right-wing terrorism.
This policy brief provides an overview of the sociological issues underpinning the issues of far right and Islamist reciprocal or cumulative radicalisation in the Western European context. That is, these groups radicalise each other by mutually reinforcing their hate, intolerance, or indignation towards each other. The nature of reciprocal radicalisation between far right and Islamist […]
Writing in 1992, noted terrorism scholar David Rapoport remarked that nearly 90% of terrorist groups lasted less than one year. Subsequent scholarship on terrorist group longevity has similarly noted the short average lifespan of the vast majority of such groups. Why then—more than three decades after it was originally founded—has al-Qaeda been able to enjoy […]
Introduction In the past months, there has been considerable discussion about whether or not foreign fighters and their families currently detained in camps in Syria should be repatriated. An often-heard justification in Western Europe not to opt for repatriation is the fact that prosecution of the adults will often lead to light sentences and thus […]