Dr. Colin P. Clarke
Executive Director, The Soufan Group
2021, 2022, 2023, Current
Colin P. Clarke, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of The Soufan Center. His research focuses on domestic and transnational terrorism, international security, and geopolitics.
Dr. Clarke previously served as the Director of Research at The Soufan Group and as a Senior Research Fellow with The Soufan Center. Prior to those roles, Clarke was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he spent a decade researching terrorism, insurgency, and criminal networks. At RAND, Clarke led studies on ISIS financing, the future of terrorism and transnational crime, and lessons learned from all insurgencies since the end of World War II.
Clarke is also an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) – The Hague, a non-resident Senior Fellow in the Program on National Security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), an Associate Fellow at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), and a member of the “Network of Experts” at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
He serves on the editorial board of three of the leading scholarly journals in the field of terrorism studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Perspectives on Terrorism, as well as the Advisory Board of the Orion Policy Institute, an independent non-profit think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Clarke has testified before Congress on numerous occasions as an expert witness on a range of terrorism-related issues, appears frequently in the media to discuss national security-related matters, and has published several books on terrorism and armed conflict, including his forthcoming Moscow’s Mercenaries: The Rise and Fall of the Wagner Group (Columbia University Press, 2026).
Clarke has briefed his research at a range of national and international security forums, including the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Air Force Special Operations School, Society for Terrorism Research International Conference, the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), and the Counter ISIS Financing Group (CIFG), which is part of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. In 2011, he spent several months as an analyst with Combined Joint Interagency Task Force-Shafafiyat at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for General H.R. McMaster, the former U.S. National Security Advisor, where he was responsible for analyzing criminal patronage networks in Afghanistan and how these networks fueled the insurgency.
In 2025, Clarke was inducted into the New York University School of Professional Studies Hall of Fame. He earned a master’s degree in global affairs at NYU and a Ph.D. in international security policy from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA).
My network of professionals working on countering hate in all its forms grew exponentially after attending Eradicate Hate in 2021. The myriad voices represented at Eradicate Hate, from big tech companies to academic researchers to those with lived experience, reinforced to me the importance of cross-cutting and collaborative approaches to counter hate and its devastating impacts on society. I’ve been fortunate to sustain and build those networks with many of those I met at Eradicate Hate in 2021.
