Thomas Hegghammer
Thomas Hegghammer is Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. Trained in Middle East Studies at Oxford University and Sciences-Po in Paris, he has held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, New York, and Stanford Universities, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His books and edited volumes include Al-Qaida in its own Words (Harvard, 2008), Jihad in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, 2010), The Meccan Rebellion (Amal, 2011), Saudi Arabia in Transition (Cambridge, 2014), and Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists (Cambridge, forthcoming).
Despite nearly two decades of a global counter-terrorism campaign waged by the United States and its allies, there may now be four times as many Salafi jihadist fighters as there were on September 11, 2001. The total number is currently estimated at 230,000 militants spread across approximately 70 countries, with the lion’s share currently located […]
With the collapse of the so-called caliphate and the morphing of the proto-state back into an insurgency, the virtual presence of Islamic State is now one the ways for the group to maintain a link with its international audience and supporters. Nevertheless, after a peak in the years 2014-2015, IS’ media production has also sharply […]
Most Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) strategies assign a prominent role to counter or alternative narratives. The thinking behind these strategies goes something like this: groups like the so called Islamic State and Al Qaeda have been dominating the messaging war by reaching out over multiple platforms while culturally and individually tailoring their messages. The argument […]