The mission of the Terrorism Research Initiative (TRI) is to “Enhance Security through Collaborative Research”. Beginning in 2014, in support of this mission, TRI has organised a competition and award for the ‘Best Doctoral Dissertation on Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism’, meant for young scholars who have recently completed their doctorate at an academic institution.
The jury utilised a standard set of criteria to assess the quality of the submissions we received. These included whether or not the thesis under consideration was the product of in-depth research, whether it showed originality in terms of introducing new data, theory or methodology, and whether it showed novelty/uniqueness in its findings.
While all four finalists produced remarkable theses, the jury concluded in the end that Dr. Levi J. West (Lecturer Terrorism Studies, Australian Graduate School of Policing, Charles Sturt University) should be the WINNER of the 2023 TRI Thesis Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation on Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism.
His thesis, drawing to a remarkable extent on primary source material for its three paradigmatic case studies, revisited the theoretical approaches of older seminal terrorism studies and developed a generalisable framework for understanding the strategic effects of terrorism. The chairman and the jury members of the TRI Thesis Award congratulate Dr West for this outstanding achievement