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.
On the 9 year anniversary of the Westgate attack, this Perspective takes stock of recent political developments and the evolution of the threat from al-Shabaab within both Somalia and Kenya.
This perspective analyses the recent ECtHR ruling and explains its impact on the policy of European countries to repatriate children that are still in the Northeast Syria camps.
This Perspective will assess five common predictions of the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan when they took over a year ago and consider whether things turned out as badly as many believed.