Bio

A longtime writer and journalist, J.M. Berger's first book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam (2011), put him on the path to an academic career studying terrorism and extremism. The landmark book -- praised as "timely," "chilling," and "incisive" in reviews by The New York Times, Publisher's Weekly, and Kirkus -- remains the only in-depth exploration of the little-understood history of American involvement with jihadist movements around the world from the 1980s through the 2010s. 

After its publication, Berger became an increasingly prominent analyst writing about terrorism and extremism for media outlets including The Atlantic, Politico, The New York Times, and Foreign Policy magazine, and academic centers including the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the New America Foundation, the Brookings Institution and many more. Highlights included investigative research exposing for the first time the FBI's undercover infiltration of White supremacist movements during the 1990s and a personal reflection on the author's complicated relationship with an American terrorist known as Omar Hammami. 

In 2013, Berger and Google's Bill Strathearn co-authored a paper on White supremacists' use of Twitter, which opened the door to a new line of study. Berger helped pioneer a new wave of social media analysis with his extensive study of the online presence of the nascent terrorist organization, ISIS. Important insights derived from his open-source intelligence led to a collaboration with one of the world's leading scholars of terrorism, Jessica Stern, culminating in their 2015 HarperCollins book, ISIS: The State of Terror, which remains one of the most important and influential works on the terrorist movement's origins and worldwide influence. 

Based on his work studying ISIS propaganda and the evolution of the White supremacist movement known as Christian Identity for the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, Berger outlined a new definition and theory of extremism in his 2018 MIT Press book, Extremism. Named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2019, Extremism has won a place on college syllabi around the world and has been praised in reviews as "meticulous," "an excellent primer," "exceptional" and "elegantly written." Based on his 2024 doctoral dissertation for the Swansea University School of Law, Berger's next book, The Social Construction of Extremism, will expand on the concepts introduced in Extremism to propose a bold new theory explaining how and why extremist ideologies arise and what they do for adherents. 

In 2023, Berger joined the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies as a senior research fellow, publishing three major papers on a new concept known as lawful extremism. The first paper, published in 2023, examined an 1856 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled Black people could never be citizens of the United States. The second, co-authored with CTEC's Beth Daviess in 2024, explored the racist ideology that led to America's adoption of the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The third paper, also with Beth Daviess, analyzes legislation targeting transgender people in Florida.