William F McCants

Background and Education

Dr. McCants is a Lecturer at SAIS, a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy, and director of its Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. He has also held various government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism. From 2009 to 2011, McCants served as a U.S. State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He has also held positions as program manager of the Minerva Initiative for the Department of Defense; an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and SAIC; and a fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. He is the author of "The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State" (St. Martin''s Press, 2015).