Welcome

This is the website of Ahmed Ajil, criminologist, researcher and writer. You will find his scientific publications, contributions to media and press, blog posts, as well as information about the expertise he can offer.

Ahmed Ajil holds a doctorate in criminology and is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Lucerne. He is currently leading the research in the SNSF-funded project Between intensification and relativisation under the responsibility of Prof. Dr. Martin Baumann.

Ahmed Ajil studied International Relations at the Universities of Geneva and Alicante, and completed the MA Applied Security Strategy at the University of Exeter, where he wrote his dissertation on British Foreign Fighters returning from Syria and Iraq. He then worked in the NGO sector in Jordan before embarking on a Master of Law in Criminology and Security at the University of Lausanne, with an exchange semester at the Université de Montréal. He wrote his Master’s thesis on Security from below: A qualitative analysis of Syrian and Iraqi refugees’ human (in)security.

His doctoral thesis at the University of Lausanne and the Faculty of Political Science at the Université Laval in Québec was supported by the SNSF Doc.CH Grant. In it, he dealt with political-ideological mobilisation and violence in connection with conflicts in the Arab world. The resulting book Politico-ideological violence and mobilisation in the Arab World: All in was published by Routledge in 2023.

His research project ‘Decrypting and evaluating the Swiss anti-terror dispositif’ was supported by the SNSF Postdoc.Mobility  grant and included research stays at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg i. B. and the London School of Oriental and African Studies. With the help of funding from the ‘Relations Internationales’ fund of the Universities of Lausanne and Brussels (ULB), he also researched the structures of extremism prevention in Switzerland and Belgium.

Outside of his academic activities, Ahmed Ajil worked as a research assistant in the field of the penitentiary system (Swiss Competence Centre for the Penitentiary System), where he published the handbook ‘Dynamic Security in Penal Settings’ in 2022. He also worked as a criminal analyst at the Federal Office of Police fedpol. He sporadically carries out research mandates for national and international organisations. And he also enjoys creative writing.