| | | | | Admiral Timothy J. Keating Joins Jamestown Board Forthcoming Events
New Releases Media Appearances Featured Articles Support Jamestown | |
Jamestown Staff & Fellows | | | President Editor, China Brief Program Associate Program Associate/Events Coordinator Managing Editor of Global Terrorism Analysis Director of Programs, Balkans, Caucasus & Central Asia Senior Fellow – China Program Senior Fellow – Eurasia Program Senior Fellow Senior Fellow – Eurasia Program Senior Fellow | |
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| | Admiral Timothy J. Keating Joins Jamestown Board | |  The Jamestown Foundation is proud to announce the addition of Admiral Timothy J. Keating to the Jamestown board.
Admiral Timothy J. Keating is a highly decorated, retired Admiral of the U.S. Navy and the former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, where he worked to preserve the security of our nation across the Asia-Pacific region.
Admiral Timothy J. Keating retired in December 2009 after serving for three years as the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii. His area of responsibility included over 3.4 billion people and half the surface of the earth. While in command, Admiral Keating visited over 30 countries, meeting diplomats, military officials and commercial leaders to emphasize active engagement with national and international partners in preserving the security and stability upon which the Asia-Pacific region’s success depends. Prior to his tour at Pacific Command, Keating was responsible for protecting the United States homeland and providing support to federal, state and local officials in time of crisis. Simultaneously, he was Commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, providing aerospace warning, air sovereignty and defense for the United States and Canada. Previous tours include service as Director of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, commander of the U.S. Fifth Fleet and all naval forces in the United States Central Command headquartered in the Kingdom of Bahrain, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans, Policy and Operations) in the Pentagon, commander of the USS Kitty Hawk Battle Group stationed in Yokosuka, Japan, and Deputy Director for Operations (Current Operations) on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon. Admiral Keating held command positions at the Naval Strike Warfare Center, a Carrier Air Wing and an F-18 Squadron. Admiral Keating is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and was a Chief of Naval Operations Fellow with the Strategic Studies Group in Newport, Rhode Island. He has accumulated over 5,000 hours of flight time in tactical jets and has landed on Navy aircraft carriers over 1,200 times. In addition to numerous awards from the United States, he has received military decorations from Great Britain, Bahrain, Canada, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore. He is a proud honorary Master Chief Petty Officer in the United States Navy. Admiral Keating serves several organizations as an international consultant, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a board member of a number of corporate and nonprofit entities. Founded in 1984, The Jamestown Foundation is an independent, non-partisan research institution dedicated to providing timely information concerning critical political and strategic developments in China, Russia, Eurasia and the world of terrorism. Jamestown produces three periodic publications: Eurasia Daily Monitor, Terrorism Monitor and China Brief. Jamestown research and analysis is available to the public free-of-charge via Jamestown’s website, www.jamestown.org. | | | |
| | Save the Date! Sixth Annual Terrorism Conference: “Implications of the Arab Spring for Insurgencies, the Jihadist Movement and al-Qaeda”
The Jamestown Foundation will hold the 6th Annual Terrorism Conference from 8:30 AM – 4:15 PM on Wednesday, December 12 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. The conference will feature regional and counterterrorism experts such as former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and Jamestown Board Member General Michael Hayden. Our keynote speaker will be Sheikh Falah Ajil Abdul Karim al-Jarba of the Shammar Tribe in Syria. To see the agenda and participant biographies, click here | | | |
“Northern Nigeria’s Boko Haram: The Prize in Al-Qaeda’s African Strategy” Occasional Report Released! | |  The Occasional Paper, entitled “Northern Nigeria’s Boko Haram: The Prize in Al-Qaeda’s Africa Strategy” is now available for purchase on our website. This Occasional Paper examines the evolution of al-Qaeda’s Africa strategy from its focus on East Africa in the 1990s to the entire African continent by the mid-2000s. It then analyzes al-Qaeda’s efforts to establish a relationship with Boko Haram’s predecessor, the Nigerian Taliban, from 2003 to 2009; the evolution of the Boko Haram threat to Nigeria and its neighbors in Nigeria from 2009 to late 2012; and the extent to which al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which now controls the separatist state in northern Mali called “Azawad” with two allied Islamist militias, has interacted with Boko Haram and other militants in northern Nigeria. The paper argues that al-Qaeda has been interested in expanding its anti-American and transnational militant agenda to Nigeria through local Nigerian militants, but that the Nigerian Taliban largely pursued its own socio-political agenda in Nigeria. As a result, a partnership between al-Qaeda and Nigerian militants was never forged in the 2000s. However, since the rise of Boko Haram in 2009, which evolved from the Nigerian Taliban, the group‘s ideology has become much more anti-American, largely due to a change in leadership from the late Mohammed Yusuf to his former second-in-command Abubakr Shekau. AQIM’s rise in northern Mali, which is only 300 miles from northern Nigeria, will facilitate an al-Qaeda and Boko Haram alliance. As AQIM and Boko Haram’s areas of operations begin to overlap in northern Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, so will their interests. This will have a significant impact on the stability of Nigeria, U.S. interests in Nigeria, and West African regional security. | | | |
| | Terrorism Monitor On November 2, the Managing Editor of the Jamestown Foundation’s Global Terrorism Analysis publications Andrew McGregor wrote an article for Terrorism Monoitor entitled “Kenya’s Coast Province and the Mombassa Republican Council: Islamists, Separatists or Political Pawns?” In the article,McGregor discusses Kenya’s decision to launch a military intervention in Somalia to eliminate the threat posed by the Islamist al-Shabaab movement. The intervention has resulted in battlefield successes but has also led to terrorist attacks and riots in the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa and even the formation of a Kenyan chapter of al-Shabaab. McGregor explains that simultaneous with these events are a growing number of incidents of political violence in Kenya’s largely Islamic Coast Province, a region with an active secessionist movement that operates under the name of the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC). Formed in 1999, the MRC has until recently focused on legal means of attaining independence for the Coast region, which hassignificant cultural, linguistic, ethnic, historical and religious differences from the inland regions of Kenya where national power is held. McGregor points out that though Kenyan authorities have acknowledged that the MRC has legitimate grievances and are not terrorists, the MRC has been increasingly under attack. McGregor analyzes the mispercpeption that the MRC is an exclusively Muslim organization, the risks associated with outlawing the MRC and the fate of the pursuit of independence in Kenya’s Islamic Coast Province. Eurasia Daily Monitor On October 18, Jamestown Non-Resident Senior Fellow Mairbek Vatchagaev wrote an article for Eurasia Daily Monitor entitled, “Caucasus Emirate’s Ethnic Russian Suicide Bombers,” which explores the under-analyzed phenomenon of ethnic Russian converts to radical Islam in the Russian Federation. Orthodox Christian converts to Islam—though for now fairly limited in numbers—tend to be viewed by the majority of Russians in negative terms, and more than 40 percent consider them “traitors.” Nonetheless, as Vatchagaev points out, individual ethnic Russians have been joining the Islamic insurgency since the first Chechen War, and have included the infamous and influential insurgent leader Said Buryatsky, as well as the 2004 Moscow metro bomber Nikolai Kipkeyev. According to Vatchagaev, ethnic Russians convert to radical, rather than moderate, forms of Islam and actively join the insurgency movements in the North Caucasus as well as across the world, including Syria and Afghanistan. These represent a fervent rejection of the familiar Orthodox Church and the Russian government, both of which have been merging ever closer under the increasingly authoritarian Putinist system—repelling Russian youths. On the other hand, radical Islam and the North Caucasian insurgencies represent an active method for independence from and armed resistance to the Russian authorities. As such, the conversion of ethnic Russian youths to militant radical Islam is not a religious, but rather a political phenomenon. And Vatchagaev hints that the only way it will be halted is if sufficient democratization, honesty and openness are reintroduced to Russian political life. | | | |
| | An article by Jamestown’s Andrew McGregor on the Mombasa Republican Council was reprinted on the UNHCR website. Jamestown analyst Jacob Zenn was interviewed and featured in an article by Toronto Star. | | | |
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The Jamestown Foundation is proud to announce the addition of Admiral Timothy J. Keating to the Jamestown board. 
The Occasional Paper, entitled “Northern Nigeria’s Boko Haram: The Prize in Al-Qaeda’s Africa Strategy” is now available for purchase on our website. 
