Dr. Colin P. Clarke
Colin P. Clarke is an Associate Fellow at ICCT and a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where his research focuses on insurgency, political violence, transnational terrorism, criminal networks and a range of other international security issues. At the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, he is an affiliated scholar with research interests related to transnational terrorism and violent non-state actors. At New York University’s Center for Global Affairs, Clarke is an associate of the Initative on the Study of Emerging Threats (ISET).
At Carnegie Mellon University, Clarke is a Lecturer and teaches courses on U.S. Grand Strategy and Terrorism & Insurgency. In 2011, he spent three months embedded with Combined Joint Inter-agency Task Force Shafafiyat in Kabul, Afghanistan, working on anti-corruption efforts and analyzing the nexus between terrorists, drug traffickers, and a range of political and economic power brokers. CJIATF Shafafiyat was commanded by Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster. Clarke is the author of Terrorism, Inc.: The Financing of Terrorism, Insurgency, and Irregular Warfare, published in 2015 by Praeger Security International.
Clarke appears frequently in the media to comment on terrorism and his work has been published in a range of newspapers and academic journals. He received his Ph.D. in international security policy from the University of Pittsburgh.
Since President Trump attempted to ban Muslims from certain countries from entering the United States, the question which Muslims are ‘moderate Muslims’ and which are potential ‘radical Islamist terrorists’ has gained new relevance. While some Muslim leaders deny any connection between their religion and terrorism, it is undeniable that many terrorists claim to act in […]
This Report engages in a comparative analysis of ISIS’s Dabiq and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazines in order to ‘reverse engineer’ lessons for CT-CVE strategic communications. It examines how Dabiq and Inspire deploy messaging that is strategically designed to appeal to its audiences and drive their radicalisation. This study particularly focuses on how […]
This essay builds on Kyle Orton’s recent article for BICOM’s series on “The Day After ISIS,” which comprehensively lays out the political, social, and military conditions that will determine whether the Islamic State (IS) will survive the current efforts to defeat it in Syria and Iraq. I want to focus on some of the interesting aspects of […]