CENS Seminar 3 by Professor Emeritus Alex P. Schmid, CENS Distinguished Visiting Fellow
Enhancing Collaboration between Governments and Universities for the Analysis of Terrorism
Abstract:
A number of issues are identified and discussed when it comes to cooperation between academia and governments, including these:
- Problems of accessing secret data held by governments;
- Lack of trust between often left-of-center academics and right-of-center government officials;
- Short-term policy needs vs. time-consuming in-depth analyses;
- Academic wish to publish results vs. government apprehension regarding study outcomes that can put government into a bad light in front of public opinion;
- Competition from think tanks and commercial CT groups staffed by ex-intelligence community members;
- Legal problems associated with ongoing court cases;
- Academic open source vs. all source access by intelligence communities;
- Evaluation studies of CT policies based on primary sources.
Existing forms of cooperation between government agencies and academia are discussed on the basis of examples from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Israel, and proposals of improve relationships are made.
About the Speaker:
Professor Emeritus Alex P. Schmid is a Research Fellow of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague. He is also Director of the Terrorism Research Initiative (TRI), an international network of 15 institutes and more than 100 individual scholars and professionals seeking to enhance security through collaborative research. Dr. Schmid is Editor-in-Chief of the online journal ‘Perspectives on Terrorism’. (www.terrorismanalysts.com) and former Co-editor of ‘Terrorism and Political Violence’. Previous positions held included Officer-in-Charge of the United Nations Terrorism Prevention Branch (UNODC/TPB) in Vienna and Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV) at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where Dr. Schmid also held a chair in International Relations. He has more than 180 reports and publications to his name, including the acclaimed ‘Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research’ (2011/13), a sequel to his award-winning handbook on Political Terrorism (1984/1988/2005).
For invitation inquiries please contact:
Ms Yvonne Lee
Email: [email protected]
