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:
- March 2012: The YouTube Jihadists: A Social Network Analysis of Al-Muhajiroun’s Propaganda Campaign [With Jytte Klausen, Eliane Barbieri, and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick]
- November 2012: Maqdisi’s Disciples in Libya and Tunisia
- January 2013: The State of the Global Jihad Online: A Qualitative, Quantitative, and Cross-Lingual Analysis
- March 2013: Meeting Tunisia’s Ansar al-Sharia
- July 2013: How Syria’s Civil War Became a Holy Crusade [With Thomas Hegghammer]
- August 2013: Libya’s Jihadists Beyond Benghazi
- January 2014: The Vocabulary of Sectarianism [With Phillip Smyth]
- May 2014: When Jihadists Learn How to Help
- June 2014: The ISIS Guide to Building an Islamic State
- June 2014: The War Between ISIS and al-Qaeda for Supremacy of the Global Jihadist Movement
- January 2015: The Islamic State’s Model
- August 2015: Picture Or It Didn’t Happen: A Snapshot of the Islamic State’s Official Media Output
- September 2015: From the Archduke to the Caliph: The Islamist Evolution that Led to the ‘Islamic State’
- January 2016: The Islamic State’s Territorial Methodology
- June 2016: The Islamic State’s Views on Homosexuality [With Jacob Olidort]
- July 2016: Jihadism in Lebanon After the Syrian Uprising
- April 2017: Fifteen Years Since the Djerba Synagogue Bombing
- June 2017: How al-Qaeda Survived Drones, Uprisings, and the Islamic State (editor)
- January 2018: The Others: Foreign Fighters in Libya
- October 2018: Tunisia’s Female Jihadists
- November 2018: Tunisian Foreign Fighters in Iraq and Syria
- February 2019: Not Gonna Be Able To Do It: al-Qaeda in Tunisia’s Inability to Take Advantage of the Islamic State’s Setbacks
- September 2019: The Development of Tunisia’s Domestic Counter-Terrorism Finance Capability [With Katherine Bauer]
- October 2019: Wilayat al-Hawl: ‘Remaining’ and Incubating the Next Islamic State Generation
- October 2019: Baghdadi Is Dead But His Legend Lives On
- February 2020: Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad
- September 2020: Living Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain: The Case of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi
- December 2020: My Beloved Brothers in God, This Is An Invitation: The Islamic State’s Dawa and Mosques Administration
- February 2021: Syria at the Center of Power Competition and Counterterrorism
- August 2021: From Global Jihad to Local Regime: HTS Builds Different Forms of Legitimacy
- May 2022: The Age of Political Jihadism: A Study of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
- July 2022: Why Is It So Difficult to Get Off a Terrorist List?
- February 2023: Jihadi ‘Counterterrorism:’ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham Versus the Islamic State
- March 2023: Introducing the Islamic State Select Worldwide Activity Map
- September 2023: ISKP Goes Global: External Operations from Afghanistan
- September 2023: The Islamic State’s Shadow Governance in Eastern Syria Since the Fall of Baghuz [With Devorah Margolin]
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/