Alex P. Schmid

Prof. em. Alex P. Schmid is a Distinguished Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) and Director of the Terrorism Research Initiative (TRI), an international network of scholars who seek to enhance human security through collaborative research.

Between 1978 and 2018 he was, for various periods of time, working in different capacities at Leiden University. In addition, he was Extraordinary Professor for Conflict Resolution at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and later held a Chair in International Relations at the University of St. Andrews, where he was also Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV).

Prof. em. Alex Schmid has also held various other positions, including, for nearly seven years, Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of UNODC in Vienna in the rank of a Senior Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Officer. His latest book is his Handbook of Terrorism Prevention and Preparedness, which features contributions from leading experts in the field and aims to be an authoritative resource on counter-terrorism. You can read the Handbook in full here. 

Schmid has nearly 200 publications in ten languages to his name, including an award-winning handbook on terrorism (1984, 1988, 2005, 2011, 2013). Until 2009 he was co-editor of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence. Since then he is Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives on Terrorism, the largest scholarly online journal in the field of Terrorism Studies.