Ahmed Ajil

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.

In 2025, he obtained a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) to conduct his 5-year research project "TRACES: Terrorism, race and embodied security". He will conduct this project at the University of Lucerne, where he will be promoted to Assistant Professor in Behavioural Sciences, with a focus on Criminology and Security studies.

Ahmed 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.

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. The resulting book Politico-ideological violence and mobilisation in the Arab World: All in was published by Routledge in 2023.

His Postdoc.Mobility research on 'Decrypting and evaluating the Swiss anti-terror dispositif' included stays at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg, and the London School of Oriental and African Studies.

Outside of academia, Ahmed worked as a research assistant at the 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 enjoys creative writing.