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.
Children returning to Europe from the conflict zone in Iraq and Syria under ISIS regime need gender- and age-sensitive rehabilitation and reintegration interventions.
Keywords: Taliban; Afghanistan; recognition; counter-terrorism; constitutional; international law; human rights; conditionality No country has “recognised” the Taliban as Afghanistan’s new government since it took power in August 2021. There has been much speculation about the preconditions and consequences of recognition. One important question is whether and how recognition or non-recognition may affect counter-terrorism efforts. Governments under […]
Counter-Terrorism After 9/11 is a podcast series exploring how counter-terrorism has changed in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. In our sixth episode, we speak to Ambassador Roya Rahmani, Afghan diplomat, and the first woman to serve as the Afghan ambassador to the United States and Indonesia. This interview explores Amb. Rahmani’s […]