Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

He has contributed chapters to other books, notably The Handbook of Political Science: A Global Perspective (Sage, 2020) The Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations (Routledge, 2019), Orientalismes/Occidentalismes: A Propos de L'Oeuvre d'Edward Said (Hermann, 2018), The UN and the Global South, 1945 and 2015 (Routledge, 2017), Minding the Gap: African Conflict Management in a Time of Change (CIGI, 2016), La Guerre au Mali (La Découverte, 2013), The Role of the Arab-Islamic World in the Rise of the West (Palgrave, 2012), Violent Non-State Actors in Contemporary World Politics (Columbia University Press, 2010), Rethinking the Foreign Policies of the Global South – Seeking Conceptual Frameworks (Lynne Reinner, 2003), and Governance, and Democratization in the Middle East (Avebury Press, 1998).

In December 2018, the television news channel Al Jazeera premiered a documentary entitled Rethinking Extremism. in which the work of Mohamedou is showcased. Directed by Dan Davies of Blackleaf Films, the 26-minute documentary travels around the world with Mohamedou as he meets with scholars, experts, and students to discuss the question of violent extremism. In the documentary, Mohamedou offers a critical look at the securitizing logic at play globally since 9/11, and specifically the police state surveillance architecture and construction of terrorism/violent extremism.

The third volume, A Theory of ISIS: Political Violence and the Transformation of the Global Order, was published in 2017 examining the nature of the Islamic State and its global impact on contemporary political violence.

In 2017, Mohamedou expanded his analysis of Al Qaeda by examining the case of the Islamic State in A Theory of ISIS: Political Violence and the Transformation of the Global Order. Published by Pluto Press in the United Kingdom and by the University of Chicago Press in the United States, this book offered the first full academic conceptualization and historicization of ISIS. Professor Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University called it "a ground-breaking work of political theory." Reviews of the book noted that "Mohamedou's work fills a gap... [and] his critical outlook on the existent literature on IS provides a novel take on the emergence and decline of the group. Mohamedou provides a unique, historically contextualized vantage point from which to understand the reasons for the rise of IS... a significant contribution to terrorism research.",. Others pointed out the book as a "refreshingly nuanced text...[an] essential reading to anyone who wishes to understand the ISIS phenomenon beyond the day-to-day military and national security thinking which has come to dominate much discussion regarding the group...This forcing of thought and reflection is Mohamedou’s greatest strength" . Mohamedou "offers a convincing take on the genesis, nature, and trajectory of what was for a time the most powerful terrorist group in the world. In doing so, [he] brings the social sciences into a conceptualization of the so-called Islamic State, beyond its specific geopolitical and radical Islamist nature.".

In November 2017, the College de France awarded Mohamedou its recognition prize at the occasion of a lecture he delivered at the Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre-Marcelin Berthelot in Paris, France.

In May 2016, New African magazine named Mohamedou among the 50 influential African intellectuals.

Since 2014, he is a Commissioner in the West Africa Commission on Drugs (WACD) appointed by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, and, since 2017, a member of the High Level Panel on Migration set up by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the African Union. He has spoken before the World Economic Forum at Davos, the Valdai Discussion Club, the Paris Peace Forum, and the New York Forum.

Mohamedou teaches in the International History Department at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva since 2010,, and has been chair of that department since 2017. He was Deputy Director and Academic Dean of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy from 2014 to 2017. He is a lecturer at the Doctoral School at Sciences Po Paris since 2013 and teaches summer schools at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Mohamedou was Visiting Professor at the University of Milan and he has delivered keynote lectures at Oxford University, New York University, King's College, the European University Institute, the University of St. Andrews, the University of Montreal, Laval University, the University of Exeter, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, the United Nations University in Tokyo, the Egmont Institute in Brussels, the Ecole de Guerre in Paris, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the George C. Marshall Center for Security Studies, the NATO Defense College in Rome, and the American University in Beirut. He sits on the Scientific Committee of the Middle East Programme of the European University Institute and on the editorial board of the journal Relations Internationales.

He was appointed as Ambassador and Director of Multilateral Cooperation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation in Mauritania in 2008, and subsequently Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. He went back to academia in 2009.

The second volume, Understanding Al Qaeda: Changing War and Global Politics was released in 2007 focusing on Al Qaeda's structure and strategy.

Mohamedou wrote an influential book on Al Qaeda entitled Understanding Al Qaeda: The Transformation of War which was published in 2006 (in the United Kingdom) by Pluto Press, and 2007 (in the United States) by the University of Pennsylvania Press. An expanded and revised version retitled Understanding Al Qaeda: Changing War and Global Politics was released in 2011.

Among his most influential works is a study on the mutation of the modern forms of war and the rise of transnational terrorism published by Harvard University in 2005 entitled "Non-Linearity of Engagement", from which an op-ed was derived and published in The New York Times and The Boston Globe.

From 2004 to 2008, Mohamedou was Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard University where he founded the Transnational and Non-State Armed Groups Project.

In French, Mohamedou wrote Contre-Croisade: Origines et Conséquences du 11 Septembre, an in-depth investigation of the events leading up to and after the September 11 attacks, which was published by l'Harmattan in Paris in 2004 and reissued in 2011 under the title Contre-Croisade: Le 11 Septembre et le Retournement du Monde. An Arabic version was published in 2010.

The first volume, Contre-Croisade: Le 11 Septembre et le Retournement du Monde, was published in 2004 looking at the origins and consequences of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Mohamedou was Director of Research at the International Council on Human Rights Policy, located in Geneva, from 1998 to 2004, where he oversaw research on national human rights institutions,, conducting research in Mexico and Nigeria, and media coverage of human rights,. He co-authored two reports on the persistence and mutation of racism and on racial and economic exclusion., which were presented at the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa in September 2001.

Mohamedou is also the author of Iraq and the Second Gulf War: State-Building and Regime Security. Originally published in 1998 by Austin & Winfeld in San Francisco and reprinted in 2002, that book has been considered "a model for further studies on the Gulf War".

Updating Martin Van Creveld's 1991 "The Transformation of War" and Herfried Munkler's 2005 "The New Wars", Mohamedou's work has been hailed as one of the latter-day most insightful and detached scientific analysis of Al Qaeda, examining in particular the mechanics of its regionalization, franchising, away of what he termed a 'mother Al Qaeda' (Al Qaeda al Oum), and assessing the long-term impact of the new forms of terrorism, 'the militarization of Islamism', and the post-modern and post-colonial nature of ISIS.

Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou (Mohammad-Mahmoud Mohamedou; born 1968) is a political historian. A Harvard University academic, Mohamedou is Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. He is a member of the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, and is regarded as a leading international expert on the new forms of transnational terrorism. Mohamedou is also a Visiting Professor at Sciences Po Paris in the Doctoral School. Previously, he was the Deputy Director and Academic Dean of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Mauritania from 2008 until 2009.

Mohamedou was born in Atar, Mauritania on April 3, 1968. He grew up in Paris, Madrid, and New York where his father was Ambassador at the United Nations. In Spain, he studied at the Lycée Français de Madrid where he obtained his Baccalaureate in Economic and Social Sciences in 1986. In France, he received a Diplome d'Etudes Universitaires Generales (DEUG) in International Law at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University Paris I in 1988. In the United States, he earned a Bachelor in International Relations at Hunter College in New York in 1991, where he achieved the Dean's List and received the Best Student Athlete Award in Soccer in 1991. He then obtained a Master's in International Relations in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1996. There he studied with Arthur Schlesinger, Dankwart Rustow, Ralph Miliband, Irving Leonard Markowitz, Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner, Stanley Renshon, Kenneth Sherrill, and Kenneth Erickson. Supervised by Howard Lentner, his doctoral dissertation, "State-Building and Regime Security: A Study of Iraq's Decision-Making Process during the 1991 Second Gulf War", for which he conducted field research in Iraq in 1994, won the Best Dissertation of the Year Award in the Political Science Department. In 1997, he was a Post-doctoral Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University working with Roger Owen, and in 1998 was appointed Research Associate at the Ralph Bunche Institute on the United Nations in New York, then directed by Benjamin Rivlin.