Dr Jessica White
Senior Research FellowTerrorism and ConflictBiography
Dr Jessica White is a Senior Research Fellow in RUSI’s Terrorism and Conflict group. Her expertise encompasses counter-terrorism and preventing and countering violent extremism policy and programming, as well as gender mainstreaming strategies. She has over a decade’s worth of experience as a researcher and security practitioner, with a prior career as an intelligence and language analyst in the United States Navy.
Jessica conducts research and manages projects on a range of topics including far-right extremism and terrorism, security policy, gender, and terrorism in the media and online. Jessica has recently published on the impact of the pandemic and other global events on extremism, transferability of CT frameworks across the threat spectrum, as well on the importance of applying a gender lens to CT and P/CVE approaches. She is also a co-founder of the Extremism and Gaming Research Network.
Jessica is an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT).
You can access all of Jessica's contributions below.
External publications
'Finding the right mix: re-evaluating the road to gender equality in countering violent extremism programming', Critical Studies on Terrorism, 4 February 2022
'Female veterans and right-wing extremism: becoming ‘one of the boys’, ICCT Perspective, 28 January 2022
‘Book Review of Countering Violent Extremism: Making Gender Matter’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, 30 June 2021
‘Community and Gender in Counter-Terrorism Policy: Challenges and Opportunities for Transferability Across the Evolving Threat Landscape’, ICCT, 25 November 2020
‘Gender in Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism: Meaningful Inclusion of Policy in Practice’, CT MORSE, 7 October 2020
‘Gender in Countering Violent Extremism Program Design, Implementation and Evaluation: Beyond Instrumentalism’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 15 August 2020
Over the last year, since the events at the US Capitol on the 6th of January, there has been increasing scrutiny and concern around the threat of far-right extremism to and within the military - Jessica White | 4 January 2022
As the global counter-terrorism community assesses its successes and failures two decades after the 9/11 attacks, there's an opportunity to rethink how we include gender in our security planning - Jessica White | 20 August 2021
While the strategy includes a nuanced assessment of the challenges, there isn’t enough priority given to the role gender plays in extremism - Jessica White | 6 July 2021
Recognising the role of community and gender constructions is essential to effective counter-extremism and terrorism approaches - Jessica White | 6 May 2021