Magnus Ranstorp
Per Magnus Ranstorp is a Swedish scholar who has written about Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda and other militant Islamic movements. He is the Research Director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, directing a project on Strategic Terrorist Threats to Europe which focuses on radicalisation and recruitment of salafist-jihadist terrorists across Europe and the convergence between Chemical, Biological, Radioactive and Nuclear Weapons and Terrorism. Ranstorp graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota in 1985.
He was previously the Director of Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is the author of Hizballah in Lebanon as well as several articles and monographs on terrorism and counter-terrorism. He is on the international editorial advisory board of the academic journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and on the editorial boards of two newly launched peer-reviewed journals published by Taylor & Francis: Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict and Critical Studies on Terrorism. In 2003 he was invited to testify before the first hearing of the 9/11 Commission. He was a member of an Advisory Panel on Terrorism in Europe advising the EU counter-terrorism coordinator. In 2005 he was a contributor to the George C. Marshall Center directed project on "Ideological War on Terror: Synthesizing Strategies Worldwide". In 2006 Ranstorp was invited to join the European Commission Expert Group on Violent Radicalisation, an official advisory body on all matters relating to violent radicalisation and recruitment of extremists within the EU.
During the early stages of the 2011 Norway Attacks, Ranstorp claimed that the attacks could only have been the work of a network of al-Qaeda operatives, something which was later shown to be false, as the attacks were carried out by a lone white supremacist perpetrator. In his manifesto mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik copied 25 pages verbatim from an ideological text written by Evan Kohlmann and published by an institute led by Magnus Ranstorp.
In March 2017, Ransdorp disparaged the claim made by ISIS magazine Al-Naba that the 2016 Malmö ISIS-related arson was started by "a warrior from the caliphate"; the fire was later shown to have been started by an ISIS operative.
In June 2017 Ranstorp was appointed the leader of a study on jihadi salafist organisations in Sweden by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency.
