To register for your free place at this talk please email Ali Wastnidge (securityscience@imperial.ac.uk).
Terrorist success depends not only on an ability to keep one step ahead of the authorities, but also one step ahead of counter-terrorist technology. The terrorist group’s fundamental organisational imperative to act drives a persistent search for new ways to overcome, circumvent or defeat governmental security and countermeasures.
Curiously, as radical or fanatical as terrorists may be, both politically and ideologically, they are technologically conservative. This lecture will explore that paradox and assess terrorism’s ongoing technological trajectory.
Biography
Bruce Hoffman has been studying terrorism and insurgency for nearly four decades. He is a professor in Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service where he is also the Director of the Centre for Security Studies and the Security Studies Programme.
Professor Hoffman previously held the Corporate Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and was Director of RAND’s Washington DC office. He was Scholar-in-Residence for Counterterrorism at the CIA 2004–06, an adviser on counterterrorism to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq and from 2004–05 an adviser on counterinsurgency to the Multi-National Forces Iraq Headquarters. He has also advised the Iraq Study Group.
He is the author of Inside Terrorism (2006). His forthcoming books, Anonymous Soldiers: Terrorism and Counterterrorism in Palestine and The Rise of Israel and Leaderled Jihad: The Evolving Global Terrorist Threat will be published in 2014.
About the Vincent Briscoe Lecture
The Institute for Security Science and Technology’s annual lecture is named in honour of H.V.A. (Vincent) Briscoe, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Imperial College London from 1932–55. Records indicate Briscoe provided the first independent scientific advice to the Security Service in 1915, on the subject of secret German writing, and continued in service throughout the inter-war years and during and after the Second World War.