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).
Since President Trump attempted to ban Muslims from certain countries from entering the United States, the question which Muslims are ‘moderate Muslims’ and which are potential ‘radical Islamist terrorists’ has gained new relevance. While some Muslim leaders deny any connection between their religion and terrorism, it is undeniable that many terrorists claim to act in […]
This Report engages in a comparative analysis of ISIS’s Dabiq and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazines in order to ‘reverse engineer’ lessons for CT-CVE strategic communications. It examines how Dabiq and Inspire deploy messaging that is strategically designed to appeal to its audiences and drive their radicalisation. This study particularly focuses on how […]
This essay builds on Kyle Orton’s recent article for BICOM’s series on “The Day After ISIS,” which comprehensively lays out the political, social, and military conditions that will determine whether the Islamic State (IS) will survive the current efforts to defeat it in Syria and Iraq. I want to focus on some of the interesting aspects of […]