Extremism and Political Violence Scholar
Dr. Bethan Johnson is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Intelligence & Security Studies at The Citadel, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on international and domestic terrorism, conspiracy theories, modern militia movements, and intelligence collection methods.
Prior to joining The Citadel, Dr. Johnson held a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and a year-long Ernest May Fellowship in History & Policy at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. During these fellowships, she conducted research on white supremacist terrorism worldwide and authored a series of policy-relevant reports on the subject.
Dr. Johnson has served as principal investigator or co-author on mixed-method studies of terrorism and extremism for organizations including Meta, the Global Network on Extremism & Technology, the Counter Extremism Project, and the International Center for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT). She regularly presents her research at international conferences and invited forums, with recent engagements in Singapore, South Africa, Qatar, Sweden, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. Her scholarship has appeared in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Public Jurist, and Twentieth Century British History, and in 2026 she will publish a chapter with Oxford University Press examining paranoia and conspiracy theories within the American white power movement.
Beyond academia, Dr. Johnson’s expertise informs policy and legal practice. She has served as an expert consultant to the European Commission, the UK Home Office, the UK Crown Prosecution Service, and the California Commission on the State of Hate. Her research and commentary have appeared in outlets including the BBC, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, and her work has been recognized with the Terrorism Research Award and a Spencer Research Library Travel Award. She serves as Reviews and Social Media Editor for Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies and is a Current & Emerging Threats Fellow with the ICCT.
Dr. Johnson earned her PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2021 as a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholar, having previously completed an MPhil in Modern British History at Cambridge in 2017.