Watson Events

Jytte Klausen ─ Why Do They Do It? Explaining Jihadist Militancy In Western Countries

Monday, March 9, 2015

12 p.m.

Joukowsky Forum

Lunch will be provided.

Why is Jihadist recruitment on the rise in Western states? In 2006 Jytte Klausen began to collect data on Western Jihadists by coding information from court documents and other public sources. The project has since evolved, and the Western Jihadism Project now has detailed material on over 3,000 Westerners who have been involved in Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism in the past two decades. Drawing on this unique database she will address the role of organization and ideology in the growth of Islamist extremism in the West, paying particular attention to the recent terrorist incidents in France and Belgium.

Security Studies Seminar

Jytte Klausen is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International Cooperation at Brandeis University and an Affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent books are The Cartoons That Shook the World (Yale University Press 2009) about the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and the worldwide protests that followed their publication, and The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe (Oxford University Press 2005, pb. 2007), which was translated into German and Turkish.

Klausen is the founder of the Western Jihadism Project, a data collection and archive focused on Islamist Islamist extremist groups in the West. She leads a team at Brandeis University who are studying Islamist terrorist networks, funded initially by the UK Home Office, and now by an award from the National Institute of Justice at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Klausen was a British Academy Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University (2003), and a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at The American Academy in Berlin (2004). She has a PhD from the New School for Social Research (1992) and a BA and MA from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. In 2007, Klausen received the Carnegie Scholars’ Award for research on the integration of Muslim faith communities in Europe.