“It’s not just violence but the threat of violence that breathes life into terrorism, that gives it its power. For terrorism to have its power, it's not just the victim or the target— it’s the target audience, or the wider vicarious number of victims that terrorists hope to intimidate, coerce, and get them to behave in a different manner than they would have.”
On today’s episode, expert on counter terrorism and insurgency Bruce Hoffman. He’s spent more then forty years studying trends, groups, and patterns of terrorism all over the world— but lately his focus has been right here in the Unites States. Fall 2020 is a time that Bruce Hoffman calls “unprecedented” in its threat level and in the fact that so many threats are domesticated right here in the US. With both a look at history and the present, he sees the US invasion of Iraq as the “original sin, the initial cleavage” in the discord between certain sectors of the public and government institutions in this country. What is going to happen election day and beyond? Are people going to feel free to vote their conscience, all over this country, without feeling threatened?
Bruce Hoffman is Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has been studying terrorism and insurgency for four decades. He is a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he is the director of the Center for Jewish Civilization. Hoffman was previously director of both the Center for Security Studies and the Security Studies program from 2010-2017. Hoffman is also visiting professor of terrorism studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He previously held the corporate chair in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and was director of RAND’s Washington, DC, office and vice president for external affairs. Appointed by the U.S. Congress to serve as a commissioner on the Independent Commission to Review the FBI’s Post-9/11 Response to Terrorism and Radicalization (9/11 Review Commission), Hoffman was a lead author of the commission’s final report. He was scholar in residence for counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency between 2004 and 2006; an advisor on counterinsurgency to the Strategy, Plans, and Analysis office at Multi-National Forces-Iraq Headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2004 to 2005; and an advisor on counterterrorism to the Office of National Security Affairs, Coalition Provisional Authority, in Baghdad in 2004. Hoffman was also an advisor to the Iraq Study Group and member of the U.S. Congress–directed review of the curriculum, organization, and staffing of the U.S. National Intelligence University. Hoffman holds degrees in government, history, and international relations and received his doctorate from Oxford University.
