Charles Lister is a Fellow at the Middle East Institute, where he focuses on terrorism, insurgency and sub-state security threats across the Middle East. He is also a Senior Consultant to The Shaikh Group’s Syria Track II Initiative, within which he has managed over two years of face-to-face engagement with the leaderships of over 100 Syrian armed opposition groups.

Charles was formerly a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar and before that, the head of MENA at the London-based IHS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre.

Lister will be discussing his new book, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency which was published in the UK in November 2015 (Hurst Publishers) and in the U.S. on 1 February 2016 (Oxford University Press). He is also the author of Profiling the Islamic State (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).