Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow's Terrorists

Professor Audrey Kurth Cronin

Audrey Kurth Cronin is Founding Director of the Center for Security, Innovation and New Technology at American University in Washington, DC, and Professor at the School of International Service.  Professor Cronin’s career has combined academic positions and government service.  She was a faculty member and director of the core course on War and Statecraft at the U.S. National War College (2007-2011).  She came to the war college from Oxford University (Nuffield College), where she was Academic Director of Studies for the Oxford/Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War (now CCW) from 2005 to 2007.  Before that, she was Specialist in Terrorism at the Congressional Research Service, responsible for advising Members of Congress in the aftermath of 9/11. She has also served in the U.S. Executive branch, including in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy.  She frequently consults at the most senior levels of the U.S. government. 

Professor Cronin is widely published on strategy and nonstate actors. Her best-known book is How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton University Press), recently translated into Chinese and Arabic.  In 2017, The New Yorker called it a “landmark study.”  Her newest book, Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists (Oxford University Press, 2020), which Foreign Affairs recently named on its “Best of 2019” list, analyzes the risks and opportunities of emerging technologies, especially patterns of global diffusion and innovation by individuals, terrorists, insurgents and other private actors.

Wine will be served in the foyer