William McCants Session Overview

William McCants is a fellow at Brookings in the Center for Middle East Policy and director of its Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. He is also adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University and has held various government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism. From 2009-2011, McCants served as a U.S. State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He has also held positions as program manager of the Minerva Initiative for the Department of Defense; an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses and SAIC; and a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. He is the founder of Jihadica.com, an academic group blog focused on the global jihadi movement. The blog has been featured on the cover of the New York Times, and described by Wired magazine’s Danger Room as “the gold standard in militant studies.” His latest book is Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam.