Jared Stancombe

I am an analyst with Wikistrat, and an associate director with Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. I am also an AmeriCorps member serving with City Year, where I tutor and mentor children in an 8th grade inner city math classroom. After City Year, I will be traveling to rural Kenya as a scholar with the ThinkImpact Innovation Institute. I graduated from Indiana University in 2009, where I majored in political science with a focus in international relations. I specifically focused on transnational terrorism, globalization, and insurgent movements in the Middle East. I also studied Arabic and geographic information systems (GIS). I graduated with honors after writing my thesis on the relationship between opium production and insurgent strategy in Afghanistan, arguing that the Taliban take advantage of specific opportunities through the opium economy to capture political space, recruit new insurgents, and to fund their efforts through predatory taxes and a corrupt credit system. After graduation, I briefly worked with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security working as a program analyst, working in counter-terrorism and immigration policy. After resigning from DHS, I joined the United States Marine Corps as an officer candidate, but was discharged in January 2010 at Officer Candidates School due to medical reasons.