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.
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 fourth episode, we speak to Tom Parker, author of “Avoiding the Terrorist Trap: Why Respecting Human Rights is the Key to Defeating Terrorism”. This interview explores the different historical manifestations […]
In our podcast series ‘Counter-Terrorism After 9/11’ we speak to Bruce Hoffman. This interview examines how counter-terrorism has evolved, the impacts of 9/11, and the future of the Global War on Terror.
The United States National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism is built on a comprehensive threat assessment of domestic terrorism as ordered by President Biden, and prioritises far-right extremism. Although the conceptualisation contains certain flaws, the strategy acknowledges this rising threat in a comprehensive and evidence-based assessment. In this Policy Brief, we highlight the US Strategy […]