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.
The casualties caused by armed violence in Mali have increased fourfold between 2016 and 2019, with young people being among the most affected by the situation. Insecurity, lack of economic opportunities, limited mobility and poor governance place youths at risk of engagement into violent extremism. Although many initiatives have been developed to prevent and counter […]
This report examines the social media shutdown in the wake of the Easter Attacks in Sri Lanka, and its impacts on journalists and post-incident communal violence. By highlighting the shutdown’s limitations, social costs and impact on misinformation, this report presents key recommendations for policy-makers, journalists and other key stakeholders. This report is part of a […]
As the final report in ICCT’s series on Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW), this report presents the key functions of SALW used by terrorist organisations as well as a synthesis of the main trends observed across the different regions in terms of acquisition, trafficking and use of SALW as a source of finance by […]