Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

Senior Advisor on Asymmetric Warfare

Biography

Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is a scholar, author, practitioner, and entrepreneur who is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Valens Global, a private company focused on fashioning creative solutions to complex twenty-first century challenges that has twice been named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s E360 list of the top small businesses in the United States. The International Herald Tribune has described Dr. Gartenstein-Ross as “a rising star in the counterterrorism community.” In addition to leading Valens Global, Dr. Gartenstein-Ross serves as a Senior Advisor on Asymmetric Warfare at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. Dr. Gartenstein-Ross’s previous positions include Senior Advisor to the Director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Community Partnerships, Fellow with Google’s think tank Jigsaw, and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program.

Dr. Gartenstein-Ross has led a number of major projects as a practitioner, focusing on three major lines of effort:

1.  Crafting, and supporting the creation of, strategic plans, including those adopted at a national level. In 2019, for example, Dr. Gartenstein-Ross led Valens Global’s efforts to support the drafting, threat assessment, and crafting of priority actions for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence, which was publicly released in September 2019 and has subsequently guided DHS’s approach to confronting terrorism and other forms of sub-state violence. That document has received widespread acclaim, with the New York Times editorializing that the document “focuses unapologetically on right-wing terrorism, particularly white supremacist extremism,” which constitutes “a shift that is both urgently needed and long overdue.”

2.  Analytic projects. Dr. Gartenstein-Ross has led several analytic projects that fuse cutting-edge academic methodologies, deep domain expertise, and granular command of hard-to-find details. Clients for whom he has led this work include components of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, major technology firms, and major companies in the oil and gas sphere. In this capacity, he also served as a subject-matter consultant on the militant group Asaib Ahl al-Haq during live hostage negotiations with it.

3.  Training and lectures. Dr. Gartenstein-Ross has served as an instructor for a variety of topical courses, including serving as the lead instructor for a multi-year period for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Individual Terrorism Awareness Course (INTAC); delivering lectures related to terrorism, sub-state violence, and online extremism for American, Bulgarian, Polish, and Qatari forces and officials; and leading training for Nigerian civil-society activists on militant groups’ use of the online space.

As a scholar, Dr. Gartenstein-Ross is the author or volume editor of over twenty books and monographs. He has a book on jihadist groups’ organizational learning processes forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Dr. Gartenstein-Ross has also published widely in the academic and popular press, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the leading peer-reviewed journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

Dr. Gartenstein-Ross has served as an expert witness in numerous federal court cases, both civil and criminal. He has testified on his areas of core competency before the U.S. House and Senate over a dozen times, as well as before the Canadian House of Commons. Dr. Gartenstein-Ross is also a frequently featured speaker at events and conferences across the globe.

Dr. Gartenstein-Ross can conduct research in six languages. He holds a Ph.D. in world politics from the Catholic University of America and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law, and received a 10,000 Small Businesses Certificate of Entrepreneurship in 2018.

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