Speaker
Dr. Jolene Jerard is Executive Director of Centinel, a public safety and management consultancy firm headquartered in Singapore. Centinel is founded on the ethos of connecting action-oriented approaches in a rapidly evolving and complex security environment. The firm provides authoritative perspectives on the threat of terrorism and extremism, its impact on public safety and strategies to prevent, manage and mitigate threats against states, businesses and the global community. Formerly, Assistant Professor on the Homeland Security Programme Rabdan Academy, United Arab Emirates. She is concurrently Adjunct Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where she was formerly the Deputy Head of RSIS’ specialist International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR).
Dr. Jerard received her PhD in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK. She specialises on terrorist and extremist groups in Asia. She was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies (CAPS) in Kabul, Afghanistan. She has conducted field research in several threat zones including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Southern Philippines and Southern Thailand.
She has conducted training programmes for Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement, Security and Intelligence Practitioners and Analysts in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South Asia including Afghanistan since 2008. She has been a consultant for the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute and an instructor at the NATO Center for Excellence – Defense Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) in Ankara, Turkey and is on the list of specialist instructors for the European Union’s Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe. She has co-edited several books including Terrorist Rehabilitation and Counter-Radicalisation: New Approaches to Counter-Terrorism, (UK: Routledge, 2012); Countering Extremism: Building Social Resilience through Community Engagement, (London: Imperial College Press, 2013), Resilience and Resolve: Communities Against Terrorism (London: Imperial College Press, 2015) and “Faith, Identity, Cohesion: Building a Better Future” (Singapore: World Scientific Press, July 2020).