Dr. Jeffrey M. Bale officially retired and has been appointed as an Emeritus Professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (in 2021-2022). Prior, he was a Professor in the Graduate School of International Policy and Management at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). He also regularly taught specialized courses on an adjunct basis at the Naval Postgraduate School. He obtained his BA in Middle Eastern and Islamic history at the University of Michigan, his MA in social movements and political sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and his PhD in contemporary European history at Berkeley. He previously taught at Berkeley, Columbia University, and the University of California at Irvine, and was the recipient of postdoctoral fellowships from the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia, the Office of Scholarly Programs at the Library of Congress, and the Center for German and European Studies at Berkeley.

Dr. Bale has been studying violence-prone political and religious extremists for nearly three decades – long before it suddenly became “fashionable” in the wake of the tragic 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States – and has published numerous scholarly articles on terrorism, CBRN use by terrorists and states, right-wing extremism, Islamism, and covert political operations. He has just finished co-editing (with Bassam Tibi) a special issue of the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions on Islamism, is in the final process of updating a two-part manuscript on underground neo-fascist networks in Cold War Europe and the terrorist “strategy of tension” in Italy, and is preparing three new scholarly monographs: one on the diverse array of Islamist networks currently operating in western Europe (The “Enemy Within”), another on the burgeoning “conspiracy theory” literature related to 9/11 and other major recent terrorist attacks (Imagined Terrorist Plots), and still another on the growing links between dissident left- and right-wing radicals in the West and Islamist groups (Where the Extremes Touch). He reads numerous foreign languages, has carried out specialized archival research (in the United States as well as in several European countries), has personally interviewed extremists from several political and religious milieus, and has accumulated an extensive collection of primary source materials related to both extremist and terrorist groups and covert politics). His responsibilities at MonTREP include preparing research reports on various aspects of terrorist ideologies, motivations, and operational techniques.

Dr. Bale has recently published several book chapters and articles in Patterns of Prejudice, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Democracy and Security, as well as a number of in-depth research reports for components of the U.S. government. He is currently a special consultant to the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (Taylor and Francis), and often serves as a consultant for government agencies and private organizations on matters related to terrorism and ideological extremism.

He co-authored a book (with Tamir Bar-On) published in 2022 by Lexington Press, Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship, and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right, which argues that the threat posed by "fascism" and the domestic radical right has been consistently exaggerated since the end of World War II (including in the present era, at a time when "progressivism" is hegemonic in Western countries) and that Islamism now constitutes the world's most dangerous contemporary radical right movement. He is currently working on a book project entitled "The Other Face of Rock and Roll Rebellion: The International 'Fascist' Music Underground from 1978 to the Present," which he hopes will be published in Routledge's Studies in Fascism and the Radical Right series.