Dr. Aaron Y. Zelin’s experiences researching and working in the academic and policy world provides him with a unique ability to bridge the gap between academically rigorous research and providing a practical way of understanding complex and nuanced issues as it relates to the Middle East and North Africa.

Currently, he is the Gloria and Ken Levy Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he also directs the Islamic State Worldwide Activity Map project. Zelin is also a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Politics at Brandeis University, Founder of the widely acclaimed website Jihadology and its podcast JihadPod, and a contributing writer for War on the Rock’s Adversarial newsletter. He is the author of the book Your Sons Are At Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad (Columbia University Press), which was nominated for the Neave Memorial Book Prize in 2020. Zelin is currently working on a second book tentatively titled Heart of the Believers: A History of Syrian Jihadism.

Zelin’s research focuses on Sunni jihadi groups in the Levant, North Africa, the Sahel, and Afghanistan as well as the trends of jihadi governance, online mobilization, and foreign fighting. He has conducted field research in Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel. Zelin has also testified and served as an expert witness in front of the U.S. House of Representatives and with the Department of Justice in federal judicial terrorism trials.

He is the author of a number of influential studies:

Zelin received his PhD in War Studies from King’s College London in December 2017. There, he wrote his dissertation on the history of the Tunisian jihadi movement, which was nominated for the King’s College London Graduate School Prize for Outstanding PhD Thesis. As part of the PhD program, he was the Sami David Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence from 2013-2015. In 2014, he was also a Gingko Library Scholar in London.

From 2011-2012, Zelin was a Lecturer for the Counterterrorism Practitioner Education Program for the Combating Terrorism Center, at the United States Military Academy. Since 2015, he has been on the Advisory Committee for the Center for Analysis of Terrorism in France. Zelin has also been an Associate Editor of the academic journal Perspectives on Terrorism since 2017. From 2020-2021, he was an Associate Fellow with the the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, which is run by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. From 2020-2023, he also served on the Advisory Steering Committee for the Group of Experts on the Maghreb for the Global Center on Cooperative Security. In 2024, Zelin was appointed as an affiliate for Monash University’s Global Peace and Security Centre.

Previously, Zelin was a research associate for Dr. Jytte Klausen’s Western Jihadism Project at Brandeis University. He received his M.A. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University in May 2010. His master’s thesis was on the intellectual origins of al-Qaeda’s ideology. In the three summers of 2009-2011 he studied Arabic in Egypt at the American University in Cairo, in Morocco at the Arabic Language Institute in Fez, and at Middlebury College’s Sunderland Language Center. Zelin also received his B.A. in Political Science and Near Eastern Languages and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington in May 2008. He was a member of the Political Science honors society Pi Sigma Alpha.

E-mail: azelin [at] jihadology [dot] net

Twitter: http://twitter.com/azelin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronzelin/