Episode for October 29, 2025
My conversation with Dr Colin Clarke starts at about 34 minutes after headlines and clips
Subscribe and Watch Interviews LIVE :
On YOUTUBE.com/StandUpWithPete
Stand Up is a daily podcast. I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day. This show is Ad free and fully supported by listeners like you!
Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 750 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous soul
Colin P. Clarke, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of The Soufan Center. His research focuses on domestic and transnational terrorism, international security, and geopolitics.
Dr. Clarke previously served as the Director of Research at The Soufan Group and as a Senior Research Fellow with The Soufan Center. Prior to those roles, Clarke was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he spent a decade researching terrorism, insurgency, and criminal networks. At RAND, Clarke led studies on ISIS financing, the future of terrorism and transnational crime, and lessons learned from all insurgencies since the end of World War II.
Clarke is also an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) – The Hague, a non-resident Senior Fellow in the Program on National Security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), an Associate Fellow at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), and a member of the “Network of Experts” at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
He serves on the editorial board of three of the leading scholarly journals in the field of terrorism studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Perspectives on Terrorism.
Clarke has testified before Congress on numerous occasions as an expert witness on a range of terrorism-related issues, appears frequently in the media to discuss national security-related matters, and has published several books on terrorism and armed conflict, including his forthcoming Moscow’s Mercenaries: The Rise and Fall of the Wagner Group (Columbia University Press, 2026).
Clarke has briefed his research at a range of national and international security forums, including the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Air Force Special Operations School, Society for Terrorism Research International Conference, the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), and the Counter ISIS Financing Group (CIFG), which is part of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. In 2011, he spent several months as an analyst with Combined Joint Interagency Task Force-Shafafiyat at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, working for General H.R. McMaster, the former U.S. National Security Advisor, where he was responsible for analyzing criminal patronage networks in Afghanistan and how these networks fueled the insurgency.
Clarke has a Ph.D. in international security policy from the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA).
Join us Thursday’s at 8EST for our Weekly Happy Hour Hangout!
Subscribe and Watch Interviews LIVE
On YOUTUBE.com/StandUpWithPete
Gift a Subscription https://www.patreon.com/PeteDominick/gift
Send Pete $ Directly on Venmo
Hire DJ Monzyk to build your website or help you with Marketing