I wanted to share some things I’ve been up to recently.

First, I am co-authoring a book on the history of terrorism and counter-terrorism in Australia since the 1960s! I am extremely excited by it. My co-author is Debra Smith (author of this great article), and it will be published by Palgrave MacMillan.

In less exciting news, I recently withdrew from the University of Melbourne. However I have not ended the PhD, I will resume it at Monash University. About halfway through last year my primary supervisor (David Malet, who does excellent work on foreign fighters) left Melbourne University for a position at George Washington University. I took a Leave of Absence after that, initially planning to resume my PhD there if I could find another supervisor in my area, but decided instead to return to Monash. I successfully applied and will continue my PhD there, beginning in early 2018.

The book will be my main focus for the next six months, before returning to the PhD. I will be working on a few other things in that time, such as my job at APO and some pieces of writing.

Also, my podcast with Kate Grealy will be returning. We went on hiatus again and will recommence once we have a bunch more episodes ready to go. We’ve recorded some new interviews recorded, one on militias in Indonesia and one on the role of space technology in the US-Australian alliance, and have several more planned.

I’ve also had some new articles out:

• an article published today in CTC Sentinel about the alleged terror plot in Sydney, foiled in July, which involved the targeting of an aircraft and an attempt to build a chemical device;
• an article published in July in the Jamestown Terrorism Monitor on the Brighton siege.

And I was interviewed by Fatima Measham for the Eureka Street podcast Chattersquare.

In other news, some colleagues of mine have some new pieces of research out. Pete Lentini has authored this new article (paywalled) on the Melbourne-based terrorist cell disrupted by Operation Pendennis in 2005, The Neojihadist Cell as a Religious Organization: A Melbourne Jema’ah Case Study. Michele Grossman has co-authored this study on Community Reporting Of Violent Extremist Activity And Involvement In Foreign Conflict. It’s a UK-based replication of an Australian study, which makes it particularly important as it helps terrorism studies to address the Replication Debate.

I also want to share some of what I’m reading at the moment. For the book, I’m revisiting a lot of books on Australia’s Security history:

But as we are making use of lots of untapped information, institutions like the National Archives of Australia and the Australian Legal Information Institute are invaluable, and I encourage everyone to support them.

I’m reading a bit on the Vietnam War. I just finished Thomas Richardson’s Destroy and Build: Pacification in Phuoc Thuy, 1966-1972, which I would put in the top five books ever written on Australia’s role in Vietnam. I’m currently reading a novel on the war and its aftermath, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathiser:

I’m about to start Mark Hamm and Ramon Spaaij’s book on lone wolf terrorism. The term “lone wolf” tends to evoke a lot of sarcasm now, and while I’ve had problems with how loosely the term can be used, it’s not a meaningless concept. These types of terror attacks deserves serious study, and this book looks like a rigorous and empirically-grounded example of that:

I like to balance these sort of micro-level studies with big-picture reading on world history, or on where the world may be heading. The most interesting thing I’ve read recently like that has been Amitav Acharya’s article After Liberal Hegemony: The Advent of a Multiplex World Order, and I’ve just begun Lawrence Freedman’s The Future of War: A History:

That’s it for now, but I hope to update this blog a bit more frequently. We will see!