Hot Spot Briefing — Inconvenient Truth: The Global Jihadi Threat
On Tuesday, November 12, 2024, the Strauss Center and Strauss-Clements Intelligence Studies Project hosted a hot spot briefing, “Inconvenient Truth: The Global Jihadi Threat,” with Ambassador Edmund Fitton-Brown, former UK ambassador to Yemen.
Professor Paul Pope, ISP Senior Fellow and LBJ School Professor, moderated the talk.
This discussion was part of the Brumley Speaker Series and the second in a series of hot spot briefings on regional international security areas of concern.
Ambassador Fitton-Brown described how the two decades that followed 9/11 saw a concentrated, U.S.-led international investment in counterterrorism (CT) that suppressed the threat from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
The risk Ambassador Fitton-Brown highlighted is that the international community consider the CT campaign as won and disinvest from CT in favor of other priorities at a time when events from Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza, Lebanon and Iran increase the likelihood and seriousness of a resurgent global Jihadi threat.
For questions about this event, contact Brittany Horton at brittany.horton@austin.utexas.edu.
Biography
Ambassador Edmund Fitton-Brown is currently Senior Advisor to the Counter Extremism Project. He also works part-time for the Foundation for Defence of Democracies and holds a number of advisory or fellowship positions with other institutes and think-tanks. He previously completed a full career with the UK foreign service, culminating as Ambassador to Yemen in 2015-2017. He then joined the United Nations and served for five years as Coordinator of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He is married to a Texan and is based in Austin. He has three adult children.
