Kacper Rekawek

Kacper Rekawek, PhD is a Senior Research Fellow and Programme Lead (Current and Emerging Threats) at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. Prior to joining the ICCT Kacper worked on issues related to countering terrorism and countering violent extremism while in academia (at C-Rex, Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo; the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews; SWPS University in Warsaw + a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast), think tanks (the Polish Institute of International Affairs, PISM + secondments to RUSI, London and Al Ahram Centre, Cairo) and the third sector (Countering Extremism Project in New York/Berlin and GLOBSEC in Bratislava).

Kacper’s research interest encompass a vast field related to terrorist organisations and networks, and means of countering them. He originally started as a researcher focusing on terrorism in Europe in general, and the Irish Republican Army, IRA, in particular (his PhD was a comparative study of the factions of the IRA). Since 2011, in his job as a terrorism analyst at PISM, he focused almost exclusively on global jihadism – that was also the focus of his major projects implemented while he was at GLOBSEC between 2016 and 2019. Since 2014 he has also been studying and published extensively on the Western (extremist) foreign fighters in the Russo-Ukrainian war, and from January 2020 he has been conducting research on the pre-war lives of such fighters which was supported by the Counter Extremism Project. While at C-Rex (2021-3) he also studied the “afterlives” of the aforementioned fighters who returned home after the 1st phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Rekawek has successfully led multinational research projects related to international security in general and terrorism and countering terrorism in particular (e.g. the comparative analyses of the state of European jihadism, supported by PMI Impact and Counter Extremism Project, which involved partners in 11 countries). He has worked on a number of other international projects, including efforts supported by the European Commission and NATO. He is a member and participates in the activities of the Society for Terrorism Research, European Expert Network on Terrorism Issues and the Radicalisation Awareness Network.

He is the author of three books: the first comparative study of the factions of the Irish Republican Army, IRA, published by Routledge; a popular book on terrorism titled “A Man With a Small Bomb” which came out in Poland in 2017 and the first systematic study of the phenomenon of foreign fighting in Russo-Ukrainian war which was published in December 2022 by Routledge titled Foreign Fighters in Ukraine: The Brown–Red Cocktail (https://www.routledge.com/Foreign-Fighters-in-Ukraine-The-BrownRed-Cocktail/Rekawek/p/book/9781032043982).