The Department of International Relations
in conjunction with the
Embassy of the United States of America, Malta
Present
Dr Marc Sageman
in a Public Lecture on
"Recent Trends in global neo-jihadi terrorism in
the West and the turn to political violence"
Date: Thursday 19th May 2011
Time: 10.00-11.00
Venue: Old Humanities 116
MARC SAGEMAN
Marc Sageman is an independent researcher on terrorism and the founder of Sageman Consulting, LLC.
He is a consultant to the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. He was the New York Police
Department’s first “scholar in residence” and adjunct associate professor at the School for International
and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is director of research at ARTIS and a consultant for RTI
International.
After graduating from Harvard, Marc obtained an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Sociology from New York
University. After a tour as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency in
1984. He spent a year on the Afghan Task Force then went to Islamabad from 1987 to 1989, where he ran
the U.S. unilateral programs with the Afghan Mujahedin, and New Delhi from 1989 to 1991. In 1991, he
resigned from the agency to return to medicine. He completed a residency in psychiatry at the Hospital of
the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1994, he has been in the private practice of forensic and clinical
psychiatry, and had the opportunity to evaluate about 500 murderers.
After 9/11/01, he started collecting biographical material on al Qaeda terrorists to test the validity of the
conventional wisdom on terrorism. This research has been published as Understanding Terror Networks
(University of Pennsylvania Press 2004). He continued this research, and showed how the global neo-jihadi
terrorist threat to the West evolved over time. His book Leaderless Jihad describes how the process of
radicalization in a hostile environment and enabled by the Internet is evolving into a disconnected network,
the Leaderless Jihad. Sageman may be the only individual to have testified before both the 9/11
Commission in the U.S. and the Beslan Commission in Russia. As an expert on al Qaeda and related
terrorist organizations, he has consulted with various branches of the U.S. government, including the
National Security Council, the Department of Defense, the Combatant Commanders, the National
Laboratories, the Department of Homeland Security, various agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community,
the U.S. Secret Service, the New York Police Department and various other law enforcement agencies. He
has lectured at many U.S. universities, including Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT,
the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, the Johns
Hopkins University… and many universities abroad.