Senior research fellow at Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). Jihadism specialist with eclectic interests #History #Religion #PoliSci #DataScience
Mar 4, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Pleased (and nervous!) to announce the release of my first R package: daiR. It offers programmatic access to Google Document AI, a powerful new OCR processor with expected support for many languages dair.info#rstats
daiR does two things. First, it gives access to the Document AI API, previously available only from Python, Node, & Java. Coupled with @HoloMarkeD's googleCloudStorageR, daiR allows OCR processing on scale with a workflow entirely within R. Intro here: dair.info/articles/basic… 2/5
Mar 9, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
What the Coronavirus has in common with terrorism - a thread.
The public debate about COVID 19 is marred by conceptual problems that I recognize from debates about counterterrorism
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Non-specialists talk about predictions and future scenarios as if they are determined, when in fact they depend heavily on the countermeasures we choose to put in place.
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Mar 5, 2020 • 15 tweets • 8 min read
My book “The Caravan” is out today! I’ve worked on it for over a decade, so it’s a big day for me. But it might not be obvious to everyone what it contains, so here’s a thread about it (1/15) #Azzambook@CambridgeUP
What’s it about? It's about how transnational jihadism started. Al-Qaida and ISIS did not come out of the blue; they were the result of processes that began in the 1980s. The book dissects the birth of the movement. It’s “jihadi archaeology”, but it’s not boring! (2/15)
Nov 24, 2019 • 22 tweets • 12 min read
Who killed Abdallah Azzam? Here’s a thread on the biggest murder mystery in the history of Islamism, which happened #OnThisDay 30 years ago. I spent 12 years writing his biography, so I’ll share some new info and rare pictures
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In 1989, Abdallah Azzam was the most influential jihadi ideologue in the world. A Palestinian preacher and Muslim Brother, he led had the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Widely published, well travelled, he was something of an Islamist superstar 2/x
Sep 19, 2019 • 21 tweets • 13 min read
This @guardian op-ed by @SBangstad offers a biased description of Norwegian efforts against far-right extremism and merits a response. 1/x (thread) theguardian.com/commentisfree/…@guardian@SBangstad Let me start by saying that of course Norway has a problem with racism and Islamophobia. We also have an organized far right scene, as well as an unorganized community whose members regularly glorify far-right terrorism on discussion forums online (2)
Feb 15, 2019 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
Long thread on foreign fighter repatriation. The question is immensely complicated, and I do not have a clear answer, but I have some thoughts
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First of all, we must set the case of Shamima Begum aside. It is a terrible idea to develop policy based on anecdote. I understand why the media are pushing the story – it sells – but politicians must look at the bigger picture
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