Richard McNeil-Willson
Dr Richard McNeil-Willson is a Research Associate at the Global Governance Programme, the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, in Florence. He works primarily on the BRaVE Project, a European Commission (Horizon 2020) project which explores issues of extremism, polarisation and counter-extremism in Europe. He is also an International Advisor for the CHAMPIONs Project on polarisation in Central and Eastern Europe, at the Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania (PATRIR), Cluj-Napoca.
Richard has a PhD from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, as an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) scholar, exploring the impact of counterterrorism programmes, policy and policing on activism by ‘Islamist’ organisations in Britain and Denmark, supervised by Professor Jonathan Githens-Mazer and Dr Willian Gallois, and examined by Professors Sajjid Rizvi and Tahir Abbas. He holds additional degrees from the universities of Edinburgh, Durham and Exeter (UK) and has been a Visiting Researcher at Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy) and the University of Aarhus (Denmark).
He has had intensive Arabic language training from top private institutes in the Middle East, and has conducted fieldwork throughout Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. This has resulted in academic publications on extremism, political violence and counterterrorism policies, published with Palgrave Macmillan, Manchester University Press and Edinburgh University Press, among others.
This paper examines the coverage of the pan-Arab television stations Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera regarding events and terrorist attacks in the post-2003 Iraq invasion, including different insurgencies in Iraq. This report is part of a wider project, led by the International Centre for Counter- Terrorism (ICCT) – the Hague, and funded by the EU Devco on […]
As multiple polls show, the vast majority of the seventy-million Americans who voted for Trump continue to put their faith in him as their president. In the face of so little evidence of voter fraud, why do so many people still believe his outlandish claims about the stolen election? Why do they think he should […]
The arrest of a returning foreign fighter earlier this month in Spain, suspected of planning a terrorist attack, highlights the persistence of the jihadi threat in Europe. This follows a spate of terrorist attacks and plots across Europe in the latter part of 2020, notably in France and Austria. The sum of these attacks reflects […]