William Braniff
William Braniff is the Executive Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). He previously served as the director of practitioner education at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) and an instructor in the Department of Social Sciences. Braniff is a graduate of the United States Military Academy. Following his Company Command as an Armor Officer in the U.S. Army, Braniff attended the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he received a master’s degree in international relations. Upon graduation, Braniff served as a foreign affairs specialist for the National Nuclear Security Agency. He lectures frequently for counterterrorism audiences and programs including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Joint Special Operations University, National Defense University. Braniff has also taken a keen interest in the field of countering violent extremism (CVE). He has consulted with the Department of Justice, the FBI and the National Security Staff, playing a key role in an inter-agency working group dedicated to the topic and speaking at the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism in February 2015. His research focuses on domestic and international terrorism, counterterrorism and countering violent extremism.
In 2014, Theresa May, then Home Secretary, presented to Parliament a series of Impact Assessments examining the benefits for the United Kingdom of continuing its participation within the European Union’s security and policing arrangements such as Europol, the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) and the second generation Schengen Information System (SIS II). The conclusions reached were […]
Over the course of recent weeks, the Islamic State (IS) announced that it had established a new province in India, the wilayah of Hind, after attacks on security forces in the Kashmir region. IS has also been responsible for an uptick of attacks in Pakistan under the auspices of the wilayah of Pakistan. The attacks […]
When troops of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” conquered areas of northern Iraq in August 2014, they turned against the religious minorities in the region, particularly against the Yazidis, with extreme brutality. Many men were executed; women and children were kidnapped and often systematically raped. IS specifically targeted children and adolescents, who were torn away from […]