Sajid Shapoo is a PhD candidate at Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, and a fellow with CISS.  He is a highly decorated Indian Police Service officer with 20 years of experience in sensitive and high profile counter terror assignments across India.  He has supervised several important terrorism related investigations, including the Mumbai Terror Attacks, Patna serial blasts case, and the Bodh Gaya serial blast cases.

Sajid specializes in Middle East and international security policy, and has authored and co-authored a number of papers in various international magazines and journals.  Sajid’s most recent work, co-authored with several fellows from the Soufan Center, examines the emergence of Al Qaeda on the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).  Building off of his extensive counterterrorism experience, the report, posits that the principal success of AQIS has been its ability to rewrite the global jihadist narrative from a regional perspective, what Sajid refers to as the ‘Glo-cal’ jihad: a narrative that has local roots but global aspirations. 

The report also finds a strong linkage between the spread of Wahhabism and increasing conservatism in South Asia. Though the assumption that madrassas (religious seminaries) are principal engines of global Islamic terrorism is ill-founded, it is certainly true that many Wahhabi madrassas in South Asia have been directly linked to Islamic radicalism, something which was absent in the Sufi-Islam dominated region a few decades ago.  

During his time with CISS, Sajid has worked with the CISS crisis simulation teams.