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 situation report—the third in a wider series of papers exploring the use of SALW as a source of terrorism financing—will examine the acquisition, possession, and use of SALW by terrorist organisations active in West Africa and the Horn of Africa. It will investigate the extent to which SALW may represent a direct source of […]
Transnational criminal organisations have grown in importance on the international security stage since the end of the Cold War. One subset of these illicit cross-border enterprises that has garnered increasing attention is human smuggling networks. These groups are having a destabilising impact on weak and failed states throughout Africa—as well as on the destination countries […]
This paper examines various framing processes have been developed by Far Right groups specifically in response to the global health crisis brought about by the spread of COVID-19. Through an examination of statements by six Identitarian and National Socialist movement organisations issued over a two month period from late February to late April 2020 on […]