Dr. Aaron Y. Zelin is the Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he also directs the Islamic State Worldwide Activity Map project. Zelin is also a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Politics at Brandeis University, and Founder of the widely acclaimed website Jihadology. He is author of the book Your Sons Are At Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad (Columbia University Press), which was nominated for the Neave Memorial Book Prize in 2020. Zelin is currently working on a second book tentatively titled Heart of the Believes: A History of Syrian Jihadism.
Zelin’s research focuses on Sunni jihadi groups in Syria, North Africa, and Afghanistan as well as the trend of jihadi governance, online mobilization, and foreign fighting. He has conducted field research in Tunisia, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Turkey. Zelin has also testified and served as an expert witness in front of Congress and in judicial cases.
Zelin received his PhD in War Studies from King’s College London in December 2017. There, he wrote his dissertation on the history of the Tunisian jihadi movement, which was nominated for the King’s College London Graduate School Prize for Outstanding PhD Thesis. As part of the PhD program, he was the Sami David Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence from 2013-2015. In 2014, he was also a Gingko Library Scholar in London. From 2020-2021, Zelin was an Associate Fellow with the the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, which is run by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. From 2020-2023, he also served on the Advisory Steering Committee for the Group of Experts on the Maghreb for the Global Center on Cooperative Security. Since 2017, Zelin has been an Associate Editor of the academic journal Perspectives on Terrorism.University Press.
Education
Ph.D., King's College London; M.A., Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Brandeis University; B.A., Indiana University