Dr. Ahab Bdaiwi
Ahab Bdaiwi is a Research Fellow at ICCT and Assistant Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Leiden University. He studied Middle East History and Islamic Thought at the University of Exeter (UK). He received his PhD (Exon) in Arabic and Islamic Thought in 2014. He taught Middle Eastern and Iranian History at the University of St Andrews (UK) between 2013 and 2016. His research interests at Leiden University focus on medieval Arabic and Islamic thought, and at the ICCT on militancy, Shiʿism, religious establishments and clerical networks in Iraq and Iran, and Islamic political theology.
The Islamic State is infamous for its sophisticated media campaigns, such as the one that inspired a large-scale migration of supporters to its so-called caliphate. Much less attention has been paid to its propaganda targeting local audiences, which tends to be more difficult to access and decipher. This case study examines a decade-long campaign to […]
The Research Paper opens with a conceptual discussion about definitions of ‘organised crime/groups’ (OCGs) and ‘terrorism/terrorist groups (TGs)’. It distinguishes between four types/levels of ‘links’ between OCGs and TGs and identifies two special types of violent hybrid organisations. It first summarises the main findings of a background report on the links between transnational organised crime […]
This report is a project document of ICCT’s Engaging Civil Society in Rehabilitation project, and has been produced in collaboration with the Global Center on Cooperative Security. This report examines the role of civil society organisation (CSOs) in the rehabilitation and reintegration of those associated with and affected by violent extremism. It builds on the work […]