France has suffered a disproportionate number of terrorist attacks, mostly Islamist in nature, in the 2010s and 2020s when compared to other Western nations. Why is this?
France had its first experiences with religious extremism in the 1980s as a consequence of French involvement in the Lebanese civil war. In the 1990s, a series of attacks on French soil were executed by the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA). As the years went on France saw repeated attacks linked to international jihadist movements. From 2015–2018 alone, 249 people were killed and 928 wounded in 22 terrorist attacks.
In this episode of Canadian Intelligence Eh, Borealis is joined by Alexandre Rodde, a French terrorism researcher and trainer for that country’s law enforcement to discuss the situation in France.
About my guest Alexandre Rodde
Alexandre is a security consultant specialised in terrorism and mass shootings. His work includes risk assessment, threat monitoring, and research on national security subjects.
Alexandre works with the French National Police and the French National Gendarmerie to train their tactical units to respond to terrorist events and mass shootings scenarios (40 teams trained to date).
About the host Phil Gurski
Phil Gurski is the President and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting Ltd. and Programme Director for the Security, Economics and Technology (SET) hub at the University of Ottawa’s Professional Development Institute (PDI). He worked as a senior strategic analyst at CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) from 2001-2015, specializing in violent Islamist-inspired homegrown terrorism and radicalisation.
From 1983 to 2001 he was employed as a senior multilingual analyst at Communications Security Establishment (CSE – Canada’s signals intelligence agency), specialising in the Middle East.
Find out more about Phil Gurski
Listen to more episodes:
