How did ISIS –a widely-hated, massively outnumbered and outgunned organization– manage to occupy over 120 cities, towns and villages from the Southern Philippines to Western Libya? Seeking to understand ISIS’s combat effectiveness, Omar Ashour analyses in his latest book the military and tactical innovations of ISIS and its predecessors in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt. He argues that their ability to blend conventional military tactics with innovative guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism strategies allowed ISIS to expand and endure beyond expectations. Taking advantage of this new publication by Edinburgh University Press, Casa Árabe is organizing a homonymous talk and inviting its author, currently an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, to engage in dialogue with Emy Matesan, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. This talk is a must for anyone interested in understanding how a small terrorist group can morph into a proto-state. The event will be presented by Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe's International Relations Coordinator. The conference is also available on our Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/PfWv_C9CD2w Omar Ashour is an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He is the Founding Director of the Critical Security Studies Graduate Program (MCSS). He obtained his PhD in Political Science from McGill University in Canada and his BSc and MA in Political Science (International Relations) from the American University in Cairo. Professor Ashour is specialized in asymmetric warfare, insurgency and counterinsurgency, Islamist movements and ideologies, democratization (with focus on security sector reform and civil-military relations), security, terrorism, and strategic military studies. He is the author of The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements (Routledge, 2009). He served as a senior consultant for the United Nations on security sector reform, counter-terrorism, and de- radicalization issues (2009-2013; 2015) and co-authored the United Nations' Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (UN-ESCWA) paper on security sector reform during the transitional periods of the Arab Spring. Professor Ashour served as a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution (2010-2015) and as an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London (2015-2016). Ioana Emy Matesan is an Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on Middle Eastern politics, particularly security and political violence, democratization, and Islamist movements. In Egypt and Indonesia, Matesan conducted fieldwork supported by the National Science Foundation to explore why groups adopt or abandon violence and how tactical and ideological change happens within Islamist movements. She has also researched and published on Hamas and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, new security challenges in the Middle East and North Africa after the Arab Spring, and the dynamics of resistance to foreign rule. Her book The Violence Pendulum (Oxford University Press 2020) examines what drives Islamist groups to shift between violent and nonviolent tactics. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Global Security Studies, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Terrorism and Political Violence, Journal of Strategic Security, and Nations and Nationalism. She holds a master's degree from Arizona State University and a PhD from Syracuse University. Further information: https://en.casaarabe.es/event/how-isis-fights-military-tactics-in-iraq-syria-libya-and-egypt