Prof. Rohan Gunaratna
Rohan Gunaratna is an international terrorism expert and Head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He served as counter terrorism instructor for GIGN, CTSO, D88, US NAVY SEALS, Swiss Federal Police, NYPD, and the Australian Federal Police, and conducted field research in conflict zones including Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Colombia. Author and editor of 12 books including Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (Columbia University Press), Gunaratna is also the lead author of Jane’s Counter Terrorism, a handbook for counter-terrorism practitioners. He also serves on the editorial boards of the journals Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and Terrorism and Political Violence.
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 […]