Broderick McDonald

University of Oxford / Kings College LondonThe Alan Turing Institute

Welcome! I am a researcher, writer, and consultant working on countering terrorism, violent extremism, and disinformation. I am a Research Fellow at Kings College London's XCEPT Research Programme, a Visiting Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute's Centre for Emerging Technology & Security (CETaS), and an Academic Tutor at the University of Oxford. I previously served as a Special Advisor in Parliament and as a researcher with the All Party Parliamentary Group for Genocide Prevention. Prior to this, I was a Fellow with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and an Associate Fellow of the the Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET). I currently serve on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism's Independent Advisory Board, the Aspen Institute UK's RLF Advisory Board, and the GLOCA Board of Advisors. Alongside academia, I often collaborate with industry and policymakers to better understand and address how technology shapes extremism, terrorism, and disinformation.

• Research

Research

Broderick McDonald is an academic researcher at Oxford University, Kings College London and The Alan Turing Institute with a decade of experience across government, academia, and civil society. His research focuses on countering global security threats from terrorism, extremism, and disinformation across ideologies and contexts. Broderick's research and commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Globe and Mail amongst others. Alongside his research, Broderick provides expert analysis for a range of international news broadcasters including ABC News, BBC News, BBC America, CBC News, PBS, Good Morning America, France24, and Al Jazeera News.Broderick McDonald is a Research Fellow at Kings College London's XCEPT Research Programme, a Research Associate at the Oxford Emerging Threats Group. Outside of this, he is a Visiting Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute's Centre for Emerging Technology & Security (CETaS) where his work focusses on preventing high-severity adversarial threats from terrorism, extremism, and disinformation. Prior to this, he served as an Advisor in Parliament and as a researcher with the All Party Parliamentary Group for Genocide Prevention. Previously, he was a Fellow with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the Royal Society of the Arts. He previously lived in the Middle East and conducted extensive interviews with armed combatants and foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and combatants from ISIS, HTS, and other armed groups. Broderick has conducted fieldwork across the Middle East and Central Asia, including Jordan, Lebanon, Türkiye, Uzbekistan and organised Large-N quantitative and qualitative research projects. His research has been funded by the University of Oxford, the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), UK International Development, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Kings College London, and the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). He currently serves on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)'s Independent Advisory Committee, an initative established by Meta, Google, Microsoft, and other technology platforms to counter terrorist misuse of the internet. Outside of this, he serves on the GLOCA Board of Advisors, the EU's VOX-Pol Network of Excellence leadership team, and the Aspen Institute UK's RLF Advisory Board. Alongside his research, Broderick has advised governments, NGOs, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, international prosecutors, parliamentarians, AI Security Institutes, frontier AI labs, and social media platforms on security threats and emerging technologiesOutside of this, Broderick is an Associate Member of the Global Network on Extremism & Technology (GNET), and the Extremism and Gaming Research Network (EGRN), and the All Tech is Human Responsible AI Working Group. He is a research affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) and the TSAS Research Network. He was previously as Associate Fellow at Kings College London's International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) and a co-founder of the Oxford Disinformation & Extremism Lab (OxDEL). He holds an Master's Degree from the University of Cambridge where he was a Prime Minister Mackenzie King Scholar. Broderick was recently named as a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and is an Associate Member of Chatham House in London.

Contact