Will McCants
scholar, author
Will McCants (born 1975), also known as William Faizi McCants, is a scholar of militant Islamism. He is a fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. An adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, he is a former senior advisor on violent extremism to the U.S. State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Founder and co-editor of the website Jihadica, he is also a former research analyst for CNA, a non-profit organization that encompasses the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research.
Career
Described by William Maclean, the security correspondent for Reuters, as "a leading scholar of militant Islamism", McCants is author of a 2011 book titled Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam, based on his doctoral research at Princeton University.
McCants is co-editor of Jihadica.com, which The Economist described as "a respected website".
Books
McCants, William (2012). Founding gods, inventing nations: Conquest and culture myths from antiquity to Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-15148-9.
“Will McCants” enters the record as scholar, author. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Will, McCants and scholar can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8002961. VIAF identifies the subject as 46526860. The Library of Congress control number is no2006116984. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975, 2011 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Will McCants” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.