Tim Wilson
Tim Wilson is the Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews. Tim was born in 1971, going to school in Cambridge and university in Oxford. His intellectual interests in conflict derive from working as a community worker in both North Belfast and East London in the later 1990s. Trained as an historian, his chief interest is in the widely differing effects political violence can have across different contexts. In over ten years of teaching and researching at top universities (Oxford, St Andrews, Queen’s Belfast) he has worked widely both on terrorism committed by governments, and by their opponents.
Both his teaching and research have been recommended for prizes: indeed, his first book Frontiers of Violence – a grassroots comparison of different patterns of ethnic violence – was nominated for the Royal Historical Society’s prestigious Whitfield Prize in 2010. He is currently working upon a second book that seeks to ask why militant violence in Western societies has taken the forms that it has over the past 150 years, provisionally entitled: Terrorists: A Social History of Political Violence.
He assumed the Directorship of CSTPV in September 2016.
There has been significant commentary on violent extremists’ intent to exploit this rare moment of uncertainty and instability caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic in developing countries such as Mali and Niger and public demonstrations. The global pandemic, recent protests, and government response to these demonstrations heighten the risk for violent radicalisation that affects the […]
‘IS told us this…if you leave, either we or the landmines will kill you’ Kamal, a former farmer from Daquq, Iraq The territorial defeat of the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) offers hope for Iraq and Syria. And yet, many of the factors that contributed to this terrorist organisation’s escalation remain, worsened by ongoing devastation and destruction. […]
On July 16, the UK’s Court of Appeal determined that Shamima Begum, currently at an IDP camp in northeast Syria, has the right to return to the UK to challenge the stripping of her British nationality. Born in the UK to parents of Bangladeshi origin, Begum had her UK citizenship – the only one she […]