Aube Tollu

Dissertation Title: The Social and Intimate Life of Jihadist Groups 

Committee: Laura Sjoberg, University of Oxford (chair), Caroline Lanskey, University of Cambridge, Alison Gerber, Lund University 

Teaching Interests: Research methods, Criminology, Sociology, Gender and Sexuality, Organized Crime, Artificial Intelligence and Society

Dr. Aube Tollu (they/them) is a Wallenberg Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University, working under the mentorship of Professor Forrest Stuart. A sociologist and criminologist, they study how people become and remain members of violent social movements (jihadist groups and gangs), and what this process reveals about the banal structures of care and community making that exist across human groups, and what structures the non-recognition of sameness across difference. Over seven years of ethnographic fieldwork across France, the United Kingdom, Northern Syria, Kenya, and Somalia, they have conducted more than a hundred in-depth life story interviews with members and former members of jihadist organizations, including ISIS and al-Shabaab, as well as their families, romantic and non-romantic partners, communities, and practitioners in prisons and criminal justice systems.

Their first book, The Space in Between Where the Monster Lives: Inside French Jihadist Groups, currently under review with an academic publisher, argues that jihadist organizations are held together less by ideology than by the ordinary relational life within them: the organization of care, intimacy, friendship, and kinship under conditions of profound constraint. They propose a “sociology of needs” that grounds the same unbound curiosity towards those who suffer and those who inflict harm. Their articles appear in International Affairs and Critical Studies on Terrorism, and they have been recognized by the International Studies Association's Emerging Scholar Award and The Sociological Review's 2023 Early Career Scholar Award. They are also co-founder of the Stanford Critical Artificial Intelligence Group, where they study the affectual and narrative construction of AI in the field of security and crime prevention.

Before Stanford, Aube trained at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge (MPhil) and completed their PhD in Sociology at Lund University. They hold an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA in European and War Studies from King's College London. 

They are on the academic job market for tenure-track positions beginning in the 2026–27 cycle.