Sadi Shanaah is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. His doctoral project focuses on the engagement of (British) Muslims in activities against Islamist extremism and the role of the broader socio-political context in their mobilization for counter-extremism efforts. His research interests include collective action and social movement theory, radicalisation, terrorism, and politics of the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Islamic studies. He earned his Bachelor degree in International and European Economic Studies from the State University in New York, New Paltz and Master’s degree in Contemporary European Studies from the University of Cambridge, Pembroke College. He has worked in the private sector, for the European Commission, the Prague-based think-tank Glopolis, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and as an advisor to the Czech Minister of Education. He lectured on contemporary Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the Anglo-American University in Prague and founded Insaan: Czech-Arab Center for Cultural Dialogue.

Jasper Schwampe is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. During the fall semester 2016 he was a visiting PhD fellow at the Program on Order Conflict and Violence at Yale University, USA. His doctoral research project focuses on the impact of Muslim foreign fighters on the internal dynamics of civil wars. The project is based on a variety of data-collection efforts which include several months of extensive field-work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the construction of a data-set on local recruitment into foreign fighter groups, and the systematic analysis of foreign fighter biographies. Besides that, Jasper is interested in the fields of social movement, international relations, civil war, and terrorism research. Jasper holds a BA in Political Science and History from the University of Kiel, Germany and a MSc. Econ in International Relations and Strategic Studies from Aberystwyth University, UK.