Reading · Broderick James McDonald’s Substack

Broderick McDonald is a Research Fellow at Broderick McDonald is an academic researcher at Oxford University, The Alan Turing Institute, and Kings College London with a decade of experience across government, academia, and civil society. His research focuses on countering global security threats from terrorism, extremism, and disinformation across ideologies and contexts. Broderick’s writing and commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Globe and Mail amongst others. Alongside his research, Broderick provides expert analysis for a range of international news broadcasters including ABC News, BBC News, BBC America, CBC News, PBS, Good Morning America, France24, and Al Jazeera News.

Broderick McDonald is a Research Fellow at Kings College London’s XCEPT Research Programme, a Research Associate at the Oxford Emerging Threats Group, and a Visiting Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute’s Centre for Emerging Technology & Security (CETaS). Prior to this, he served as an Advisor in Parliament and as a researcher with the All Party Parliamentary Group for Genocide Prevention. Previously, he was a Fellow with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the Royal Society of the Arts. He previously lived in the Middle East and conducted extensive interviews with armed combatants and foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and combatants from ISIS, HTS, and other armed groups. Broderick has conducted fieldwork across the Middle East and Central Asia, including Jordan, Lebanon, Türkiye, Uzbekistan and organised Large-N quantitative and qualitative research projects.

His research has been funded by the University of Oxford, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), UK International Development, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kings College London, and the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). He currently serves on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)’s Independent Advisory Committee, the Aspen Institute UK’s RLF Advisory Board, and the GLOCA Board of Advisors. Alongside his research, Broderick has advised government departments, NGOs, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, international prosecutors, parliamentarians, AI Security Institutes, frontier AI labs, and social media companies on security threats and emerging technologies

Read more: www.broderickmcdonald.com

Broderick-McDonald-speaking-at-conference — Oxford Summit

Broderick (Brody) McDonald

My research examines armed conflict, terrorism, and political violence as it unfolds both online and offline. With a background in peace and conflict studies conducting on-the-ground fieldwork in the Middle East, my research is driven by the recognition that what occurs online can have significant impact on offline outcomes, and vice versa. Only examining the online or offline dimensions of political violence and contentious politics can leave significant gaps in our understanding of how conflict onset, processes, and outcomes. The existing divisions between online and offline investigations of terrorism and violent and extremism is striking, but it limits the explanatory power we can bring to bear on this complex phenomenon. Monitoring jihadist groups or far-right extremists online may be a first step for many researchers, but collecting fine-grained data in the real world is essential to understand the fuller picture and validate hypotheses. While online research is more accessible for new researchers to get started with, we often need to understand on-the-ground conflict dynamics to develop comprehensive explanations of how terrorist groups and violent extremists organize, recruit, and fight.

My work seeks to bridge this gap by collecting fine-grained data both from detailed fieldwork (including subnational surveys, psychosocial measures, and elite/non-elite interviews with combatants, officials, and civilians) alongside primary source documents including online extremist propaganda, government records, and local media reporting to reconstruct complex conflict processes from multiple sources. Using process tracing and leveraging theoretical models from political science, sociology, and development studies to validate these theories we can gain new insights into the micro-dynamics of conflict and extremism.

Links:

https://cetas.turing.ac.uk/about/our-team/broderick-mcdonald

https://emergingthreats.co.uk/team/broderick-mcdonald/

https://www.oxgensummit.org/speakers2025/broderick-mcdonald-

https://oxford.academia.edu/BroderickMcDonald

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Broderick-Mcdonald

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=6425456

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=AtxUliMAAAAJ&hl=en

https://orcid.org/0009-0003-3639-9949

https://philpeople.org/profiles/broderick-mcdonald

https://loop.frontiersin.org/people/2797660/bio

https://osf.io/pzjrk/