Bruce Hoffman

Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Profile picture

Expert Bio

Bruce Hoffman is Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He has been studying terrorism and insurgency for almost half a century. He is a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he was the director of the Center for Jewish Civilization from 2020 to 2023 and previously director of both the Center for Security Studies and the Security Studies program from 2010 to 2017. Hoffman is also an honorary professor and professor emeritus of terrorism studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He previously held the corporate chair in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation and was director of RAND’s Washington, DC, office and vice president for external affairs. Together with Jacob Ware, he is the author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. 

Appointed by the U.S. Congress to serve as a commissioner on the Independent Commission to Review the FBI’s Post-9/11 Response to Terrorism and Radicalization (9/11 Review Commission), Hoffman was a lead author of the commission’s final report. He was scholar in residence for counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency between 2004 and 2006; an advisor on counterinsurgency to the Strategy, Plans, and Analysis office at Multi-National Forces-Iraq Headquarters in Baghdad, Iraq, from 2004 to 2005; and an advisor on counterterrorism to the Office of National Security Affairs, Coalition Provisional Authority, in Baghdad in 2004. Hoffman was also an advisor to the Iraq Study Group and member of the U.S. Congress–directed review of the curriculum, organization, and staffing of the U.S. National Intelligence University.

Hoffman was the William F. Podlich distinguished fellow and visiting professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in 2016. At the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he has been a Global Wilson fellow since 2013; a distinguished scholar in 2012; and a public policy fellow from January to July 2010. He was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, between September and December 2009. He was also a visiting professor at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore, where he was the S. Rajaratnam professor of strategic studies for 2009.

Hoffman was the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews, where he was also reader in international relations and chairman of the department of international relations. He is editor-in-chief of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, the leading scholarly journal in the field; a contributing editor to the National Interest; and editor of the Columbia University Press series on terrorism and irregular warfare.

In November 1994, the director of central intelligence awarded Hoffman the U.S. Intelligence Community Seal Medallion, the highest level of commendation given to a nongovernment employee, which recognizes sustained superior performance of high value that distinctly benefits the interests and national security of the United States. 

A revised and updated edition of his acclaimed book, Inside Terrorism, which has now been in print for nearly three decades, was published in September 2017 by Columbia University Press in the United States and was published in 2019 by Fischer Verlag in Germany. Foreign-language editions of the first edition have been published in ten countries. His other recent books include The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s Death and Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917–1947, which was awarded the Washington Institute for Near East Studies’ gold medal for the best book published in 2015 on Middle Eastern politics, history and society and also named the Jewish Book of the Year for 2015 by the Jewish National Book Council.

Hoffman holds degrees in government, history, and international relations and received his doctorate from Oxford University.

affiliations

  • Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia, visiting professor
  • Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy, senior fellow
  • Community Security Service, security advisory council member
  • Georgetown University, professor
  • Interdisciplinary Center, International Institute for Counterterrorism, Herzliya, Israel, visiting professor
  • International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, England, member, board of directors
  • James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, advisory council member
  • Jamestown Foundation, board member
  • National September 11 Memorial and Museum, advisor
  • Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, editor-in-chief
  • The Hoffman Group, president & ceo
  • University of St. Andrews, Scotland, honorary professor
  • War on the Rocks, contributing editor
Clear All
Regions
Topics
Type

Top Stories on CFR

Trade

President Trump doubled almost all aluminum and steel import tariffs, seeking to curb China’s growing dominance in global trade. These six charts show the tariffs’ potential economic effects.

Ukraine

The Sanctioning Russia Act would impose history’s highest tariffs and tank the global economy. Congress needs a better approach, one that strengthens existing sanctions and adds new measures the current bill ignores.

China Strategy Initiative

At the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the United States would be expanding its defense partnership with India. His statement was in line with U.S. policy over the last two decades, which, irrespective of the party in power, has sought to cultivate India as a serious defense partner. The U.S.-India defense partnership has come a long way. Beginning in 2001, the United States and India moved from little defense cooperation or coordination to significant gestures that would lay the foundation of the robust defense partnership that exists today—such as India offering access to its facilities after 9/11 to help the United States launch operations in Afghanistan or the 123 Agreement in 2005 that paved the way for civil nuclear cooperation between the two countries. In the United States, there is bipartisan agreement that a strong defense partnership with India is vital for its Indo-Pacific strategy and containing China. In India, too, there is broad political support for its strategic partnership with the United States given its immense wariness about its fractious border relationship with China. Consequently, the U.S.-India bilateral relationship has heavily emphasized security, with even trade tilting toward defense goods. Despite the massive changes to the relationship in the last few years, and both countries’ desire to develop ever-closer defense ties, differences between the United States and India remain. A significant part of this has to do with the differing norms that underpin the defense interests of each country. The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by defense experts in three countries are part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different areas, and illustrate India’s positions on important defense issues—military operationalization, cooperation in space, and export controls—and how they differ with respect to the United States and its allies. Sameer Lalwani (Washington, DC) argues that the two countries differ in their thinking about deterrence, and that this is evident in three categories crucial to defense: capability, geography, and interoperability. When it comes to increasing material capabilities, for example, India prioritizes domestic economic development, including developing indigenous capabilities (i.e., its domestic defense-industrial sector). With regard to geography, for example, the United States and its Western allies think of crises, such as Ukraine, in terms of global domino effects; India, in contrast, thinks regionally, and confines itself to the effects on its neighborhood and borders (and, as the recent crisis with Pakistan shows, India continues to face threats on its border, widening the geographic divergence with the United States). And India’s commitment to strategic autonomy means the two countries remain far apart on the kind of interoperability required by modern military operations. Yet there is also reason for optimism about the relationship as those differences are largely surmountable. Dimitrios Stroikos (London) argues that India’s space policy has shifted from prioritizing socioeconomic development to pursuing both national security and prestige. While it is party to all five UN space treaties that govern outer space and converges with the United States on many issues in the civil, commercial, and military domains of space, India is careful with regard to some norms. It favors, for example, bilateral initiatives over multilateral, and the inclusion of Global South countries in institutions that it believes to be dominated by the West. Konark Bhandari (New Delhi) argues that India’s stance on export controls is evolving. It has signed three of the four major international export control regimes, but it has to consistently contend with the cost of complying, particularly as the United States is increasingly and unilaterally imposing export control measures both inside and outside of those regimes. When it comes to export controls, India prefers trade agreements with select nations, prizes its strategic autonomy (which includes relations with Russia and China through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS), and prioritizes its domestic development. Furthermore, given President Donald Trump’s focus on bilateral trade, the two countries’ differences will need to be worked out if future tech cooperation is to be realized.