Dr. Mary Beth Altier
Dr. Mary Beth Altier is a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs where she directs the Transnational Security concentration and Initiative on Emerging Threats. Her research interests are in political violence, political behavior, nationalism, ethnic conflict, and international security. She has over ten years’ experience researching the disengagement and reintegration of violent extremists. Dr. Altier’s other research focuses on popular support for political violence, and armed parties in particular, in developed and developing democracies. That research received the American Political Science Association’s Ernst B. Haas Award and the European Politics and Society Section’s Best Paper Award. She has published in a number of journals including the Journal of Peace Research, Security Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and serves on the Editorial Board of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression. Dr. Altier has presented her research to various government audiences and international organizations including NATO and the UN and has published or is quoted in media outlets including The Washington Post, Lawfare, USA Today, and WIRED. She received her PhD and MA in Politics from Princeton University and BAs in Mathematics and History from Drew University.
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 […]