Elizabeth Pearson

Dr. Elizabeth Pearson is a Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London where she specialises in gender, radicalisation, and how to counter radicalisation. She is the Programme Lead for the Master's in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Studies

Elizabeth has authored two books. Her latest, 'Extreme Britain: Gender Masculinity and Radicalisation' was published with Hurst/OUP in December 2023 and argues radicalisation can be understood as a masculinities project. 'Extreme Britain' is an exploration of masculinity and misogyny in the British radical right and in a network connected to Anjem Choudary's al-Muhajiroun. The book is based on interviews with extremist activists including Choudary, Tommy Robinson (formerly EDL) and Jayda Fransen (British Freedom and formerly Britain First).

'Countering Violent Extremism : Making Gender Matter' (Palgrave, 2021) was co-authored with Emily Winterbotham of the Defence Think Tank RUSI, and Dr. Katherine Brown at Birmingham University. It is based on research on five countries with families and communities affected by radicalisation, and explores gender in their experiences of extremism and how it is countered.

Elizabeth is an Associate Fellow with RUSI and also with the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in the Hague. She is a co-director of Royal Holloway's Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre and a member of the Gender Institute.

Before academia, Elizabeth spent more than fifteen years with BBC radio where she worked in production, reporting and feature-making, mainly for BBC Radio Four.