Phil Gurski
Phil Gurski is the President and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting. He worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) from 2001-2013, specialising in Al Qaeda/Islamic State-inspired violent extremism and radicalisation. From 1983 to 2001 he was employed as a senior multilingual analyst at Communications Security Establishment, specialising in the Middle East. He also served as senior special advisor in the National Security Directorate at Public Safety Canada from 2013 until his retirement from the civil service in May 2015, and as consultant for the Ontario Provincial Police’s Anti-Terrorism Section (PATS) in 2015. Mr. Gurski has presented on Al Qaeda/Islamic State-inspired violent extremism and radicalisation across Canada and around the world. He is the author of “The Threat from Within: Recognizing Al Qaeda-inspired Radicalization and Terrorism in the West” (Rowman and Littlefield) and “Western Foreign Fighters: the threat to homeland and international security” (Rowman and Littlefield). He regularly blogs (Terrorism in Canada and the West – available on his Web site) and tweets on terrorism.
Follow Phil Gurksi on Twitter @borealissaves
The situation Mali has hit the headlines quite often in the last years, with journalistic articles and reports mainly focusing on the threat posed by terrorist groups in the country as well as in the region. Besides attracting the attention of the media, the presence of terrorist actors in the country has become a top […]
Some 5000 men, women and children have travelled from Europe to Syria and Iraq since 2012. Less than a year after this process began, European intelligence services started to openly express their concerns about the dangers emanating from the potential return of seasoned fighters. Policy responses, however, were slow in coming and mostly ad hoc, […]
In this Research Paper, Marieke Liem et al provide a bivariate analysis of lone actor terrorists and common homicide offenders. Liem et al’s findings problematise the classification of lone actors as an entity fundamentally different from the sample of single homicide offenders and call for future in-depth assessments of possible differences in homicidal drive.