Biography
Professor of Security and Military Studies and founder and architect of the Critical Security Studies and Executive Security Studies programmes at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar. He was the Founding Director of the Strategic Studies Unit at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (2018–2025), an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Security and Strategy at the University of Exeter (UK), and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and Kyiv Independent (KI) Insights (Ukraine).His research expertise and publications span how small states and smaller forces fight; warfare and battle analysis; combat and military effectiveness; operational adaptations and innovations of regular and irregular forces; the employment of specific weapon systems; counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism; and collective de-radicalisation and transformations from violence to non-violence.
He is the author of How ISIS Fights: Military Tactics in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt (Edinburgh University Press, 2021; translated into Arabic by the Arab Center in 2022 and into Ukrainian by Kyiv University Academic Press in 2023) and The De-Radicalisation of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements (Routledge, 2009); and the editor of Bullets to Ballots: Collective De-Radicalisation of Armed Movements in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia (Edinburgh University Press, 2021; translated into Arabic by the Arab Center in 2022). He has authored over a hundred peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and policy papers on comparative security and military affairs in the Middle East, Europe, the post-Soviet republics and the Americas.
Previously, Professor Ashour served as a Senior UN consultant on counterterrorism and security sector reform, where his research was described by the United Nations’ ESCWA as “extremely important in tailoring realistic and context-driven security sector reform recommendations” and as serving “to increase the debate among security sector practitioners in the region and press upon Arab governments the need for reform”.
He regularly contributes as a security and defence analyst to various local and international media broadcasters, including as host of Alaraby TV’s battle-analysis programme, Battleground. He has written hundreds of op-eds and articles published in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, Sky News, Project Syndicate, The Independent, Middle East Eye, and Ukrainian media outlets such as New Voice of Ukraine, Euromaidan Press and European Pravda.
His three current projects examine armed resistance in Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories; hybrid defence and comparative combat effectiveness of small(er) state and non-state forces; and “From Ukraine to the Gulf: Comparative Missile-Defence, Air-Defence and Hybrid Defence Lessons.”