Professor Andrew Silke holds a Chair in Criminology at Royal Holloway. He has a background in forensic psychology and criminology and has worked both in academia and for government. His primary research interests include terrorism, conflict, crime and policing, and he is internationally recognised as a leading expert on terrorism and low intensity conflict. He has a wide range of publications including several books, with his most recent including A Research Agenda for Terrorism Studies (2023) and The Routledge Handbook on Terrorism and Counterterrorism (2019).

He has worked with a wide variety of government departments and law enforcement and security agencies. In the United Kingdom these include the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Defence, HM Prison & Probation Service, the London Metropolitan Police as well as several other UK police forces. Overseas he has worked with the United Nations, the United States Department of Justice, the US Department of Homeland Security, NATO, the European Defence Agency, the European Commission, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

He was a long-serving member of the European Commission's Radicalisation Awareness Network Centre of Excellence which worked with practitioners to develop state-of-the-art knowledge to prevent and counter radicalisation to violent extremism. Prior to this, he served both on the European Commission's European Network of Experts on Radicalisation and on the Commission's Expert Group on Violent Radicalisation. He has provided invited briefings on terrorism-related issues to Select Committees of the UK House of Commons and is a member of the Cabinet Office National Risk Assessment Behavioural Science Expert Group.

Professor Silke teaches on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at Royal Holloway. He is the programme leader for the BSc Criminology and Psychology and his main teaching is on that degree and with the MSc Terrorism and Counter Terrorism Studies. In 2024/25 his primary teaching is on the modules:

The Psychology of Terrorism

Debates in Terrorism Studies

Contemporary Forms of Terrorism

Key Perspectives and Debates in Criminology

He also supervises undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations for students on the BSc Criminology and Psychology, the MSc Terrorism and Counter Terrorism Studies and the MSc Forensic Psychology programmes. 

Some of the major active and ongoing themes in Professor Silke's research currently include:

• radicalisation and de-radicalisation processes
• risk assessment
• prison, detention and terrorism
• counterterrorism strategies
• climate change and terrorism

His current major book project is a monograph for Hurst on The Triumph of Terror. This examines conflicts where terrorists have won, exploring how and why the conflicts ended as they did and what the defeated governments could and should have done differently.