Noemie Bouhana: Terrorism in Context

Talking Terror

Noémie Bouhana is Senior Lecturer in Security and Crime Science at UCL, where she leads the Counter-Terrorism Research Group and convenes the MSc in Countering Organised Crime and Terrorism. She holds a BA in Political Studies from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques of Lyon, an MA in Political Science from Université Jean Moulin Lyon III, and an MPhil and PhD in Criminology from the University of Cambridge. Most recently, Noémie led the €2.9M EU FP7 PRIME project, an international, multidisciplinary study on lone actor radicalisation and attack behaviour. At present, she is Principal Investigator of the $1M comparative study "The Social Ecology of Radicalisation", funded by the US DoD Minerva Initiative. She is also a co-Investigator on large grants funded by EU H2020 and CREST. Previous research was funded by DSTL, Home Office OSCT, MOD Counter-Terrorism Science and Technology Centre, EPSRC and NIJ. On the fundamental side, Noémie's work is concerned with the social ecological processes involved in the emergence and maintenance of radicalising settings (the "where" of radicalisation, as opposed to the "why"), the role that these settings play, through mechanisms of selection and exposure, in the development of an individual propensity for terrorism, as well as the mechanisms which underpin individual vulnerability to moral change. On the applied side, she is interested in the development of risk analysis instruments, which go beyond reliance on unstable risk factors and indicators. Her approach to the study of terrorism is informed chiefly by criminological, epidemiological and systemic thinking, which is reflected in the research that most influenced her to date. Research that has influenced Noémie's career Per-Olof H. Wikstrom and Robert J. Sampson (ed.) (2006). The Explanation of Crime: Context, Mechanisms and Development. J.M. Mc Gloin, C.J. Sullivan and L.W. Kennedy (eds.) (2011). When Crime Appears: The Role of Emergence. Sandro Galea, Matthew Riddle and George A Kaplan (2010). Causal thinking and complex system approaches in epidemiology. Some of Noémie's key research Al-Qaeda-Influenced Radicalisation. With Per-Olof H. Wikstrom (2011) PRIME: A Lone Actor Extremism Risk Analysis Framework. With Amy Thornton, Emily Corner, Stefan Malthaner, Lasse Lindekilde, Bart Schuurman and Gali Perry (2017) Preventing Radicalization in the UK: Expanding the Knowledge-Base on the Channel Programme. With Amy Thornton (2017)