Dr. Craig Whiteside
Dr. Craig Whiteside is an Associate Fellow at ICCT and an Associate Professor for the Naval War College Monterey and teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is a senior associate with the Center on Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island and lectures at the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School. Whiteside’s current research focuses on the doctrinal influences of the leadership of the Islamic State movement, the evolution of its political-military doctrine since 1999, and the tribal engagement strategy that fuelled its return since 2008. His doctoral research investigated the political worldview of the Islamic State of Iraq (2003-2013). He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and Washington State University. His recent articles on the Islamic State can be found here.
This paper nuances existing understandings of terrorists’ motivations by uncovering the emotional process of ressentiment in the manifestos of three far-right violent extremists. Through the application of Reinhard Wolf’s framework of discourse analysis, it finds that ressentiment plays a significant role in self-legitimating perpetrators’ attacks, though the resented group is different than expected. Surprisingly, the […]
While the Islamic State’s early years after its expansion from Iraq to Syria are generally considered a success, it was also during this period that internal ideological tensions developed within the group. The emerging faction of al-Hazimiyya, named after the Saudi cleric Ahmad al-Hazimi, instigated a power struggle within the group that posed a serious […]
This policy brief discusses the threat of maritime terrorism in the Tri-border area and the weaknesses of the Trilateral Cooperative Arrangement, a trilateral treaty between Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines that was set up to mitigate terrorism in the region. We also highlight the challenges associated with counter-terrorism in the region such as resource allocation […]