Teaching

Teaching is informed and enhanced by ongoing research in relevant fields. My academic research examines how Jihadist-Salafist extremist groups behave in civil conflicts, especially as they consolidate their control over rival groups. It also considers how these groups establish so-called 'jihadist proto-states', or systems of local governance by violent Islamist actors, during and after consolidation. The majority of research on conflict and extremism considers how rebel groups fight against governments, but relatively little analysis has considered how rebel groups compete with each other. Intra-rebel conflict often accounts for more than half of the conflict events within civil wars and is important in understanding conflict trajectories and outcomes. Where the academic literature has considered inter-rebel conflict, it is often too narrowly focussed on fighting, ignoring a much broader typology of inter-rebel interactions which includes alliance-formation, poaching, bargaining, cooperating, and economic coordination. While nationalist rebels have received some attention within peace and conflict studies, the consolidation practices of Jihadist-Salafist groups remain almost entirely unstudied, despite the presence of such groups in more than 50% of active conflicts in the world. My research begins filling in some of these gaps in our understanding of inter-rebel competition by examining inter-rebel competition and consolidation within the Syrian Civil War. The Syrian Conflict, which began with hundreds of rival rebel groups has gradually narrowed to include only a few major factions, with Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) representing the largest and best organised. This research seeks to examine groups such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Al-Nusra / HTS), Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIL / ISIS), Al-Shabaab (AS), and the Afghan Taliban (AT). To learn more about my research, please visit the projects and publications sections of the website.