Marc Sageman
- Research field Radicalisation
- Institution Washington
- Position independent researcher
- Theme Between Salafism, sectarianism and violence: the new faces of radicalisation
Marc Sageman is an independent consultant on terrorism. After a year at the U.S. Secret Service, he was the New York Police Department’s first “scholar in residence” for over a year. For three and a half years, he was the special advisor to the U.S. Army Deputy Chief of Staff (Intelligence) on the “insider threat,” including terrorists and spies. In the fall of 2012, he was ISAF Political Scientist looking at the Insider Threat in Afghanistan.
After graduating from Harvard, he obtained an M.D. and a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University. He was a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy and a case officer at the Central Intelligence Agency for seven years. He spent three years supporting the Afghan Mujahedin resistance against the Soviet occupation. He returned to medicine and completed a residency in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a forensic and clinical psychiatrist and taught course on law and psychiatry, Holocaust perpetrators and terrorism at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University at both graduate and undergraduate levels.
He is the author of Understanding Terror Networks, Leaderless Jihad, Misunderstanding Terrorism, and several studies on the process of radicalization. His new book, Turning to Political Violence, describing a new model of this process and testing it on various campaigns of political violence spanning two centuries and four continents, will be published next spring. He testified before both the 9/11 Commission in the U.S. and the Beslan Commission in Russia. He has extensively consulted with most national security agencies in the U.S. and the West as well as law enforcement agencies. He has lectured at dozens of universities in the U.S. and abroad.