- International Environment and Development Studies, Noragric
Professor Stig Jarle Hansen works primarily within the fields of Security, Maritime Security, extremism, organized crime, and religion, with an additional special interest in Islamic political thought processes. Geographically, his main focus is on the wider Red Sea region, Yemen, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya. However, he has also conducted field studies in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, Pakistan, Sudan, Mali, Nigeria, Tunisia, Norway and the United States. His book, ‘Al-Shabaab in Somalia’, was critically acclaimed by Foreign Policy and The Economist, and Newsweek Magazine published a chapter of it. Another of his books on African Jihadism, The New Fault-lines of Jihad (Hurst, 2019), is the standard reference book on jihadism in Africa for many university classes around the world. Hansen is frequently used as an expert commentator by the global media and has commented for CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters, CCTV 4, and many other international media outlets. He has also testified as a court-appointed expert witness in courts in Norway, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, as well as having been invited to present for government institutions as the Senate foreign relations committee, and has testified in the House of Commons in the United Kingdom on West African Jihadism. He has also written for Jane's Defense Weekly and provided expert talks in Institutions as the Marine Corps University and the United States Special Operations Command at Tampa, as well as the European Commission and the United Nations. He was also a part of the research component following the Norwegian action plan against radicalization and violent extremism in 2014.
Professor Hansen has a master's degree in Political Science from the University of Oslo, which includes credits from UC Berkeley. He also holds a master's degree in History from the University of Oslo. He has his PhD in International Relations from Aberystwyth University, which holds the oldest Department of International Relations in the world. He led Norway’s only Master's program in International Relations from its inception in 2009 to 2016, and from 2018 to 2024. He has been a Belfer Fellow at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University from 2016 to 2017 and was a Visiting Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University from 2024-2025. He is also a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
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