Professor Rohan Gunaratna: Terrorism Expert? Or Intellectual Mercenary?

This article examines the commercialization of post-September 11 terrorism studies through a critical evaluation of Rohan Gunaratna’s career, framing it as a primary case study of “information speculation” and epistemic opportunism. It maps how Gunaratna systematically pivoted his threat assessments—ranging from hyper-inflated global Al-Qaeda networks for Western defense establishments to regional “octopus-like” Jemaah Islamiyah cells in Southeast Asia—to validate the immediate geopolitical and domestic security agendas of his state clients. Special attention is dedicated to the aftermath of the 2019 Sri Lankan Easter Sunday bombings, where Gunaratna rapidly constructed and promoted an “ISIS-only” narrative. Recent disclosures in the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court, witness testimonies regarding secret prison meetings with paramilitary leader Pillayan, and the February 2026 arrest of former State Intelligence Service chief Suresh Salley expose this narrative as a sophisticated state-backed disinformation campaign designed to shield the military establishment and facilitate political regime change. Finally, the article explores the severe human rights implications of transactional expertise, particularly its role in justifying minority repression and facilitating the refoulement of Tamil asylum seekers. Ultimately, the paper highlights the structural dangers of integrating academic and policy think tanks into state intelligence apparatuses, advocating for a return to independent, peer-verified, and transparent standards in security scholarship.

Introduction: The Political Economy of Terrorology

In the post-September 11 era, the academic study of terrorism—frequently termed “terrorology”—underwent a rapid commercialization, transforming from a niche academic pursuit into a multi-billion-dollar security-industrial complex. Within this political economy, security intelligence has often been treated not as an objective, empirical science, but as a highly flexible, transactional commodity. Analysts within this space frequently trade their academic credentials to validate the immediate geopolitical anxieties or domestic survival strategies of state clients. No figure exemplifies this trajectory of epistemic opportunism more clearly than Rohan Kumar Gunaratna.¹

Over a career spanning more than two decades, Gunaratna has positioned himself as an indispensable authority on global jihadist networks, advising heads of state, testifying before Western legislative committees, and founding state-linked research centers.¹ However, critical security scholars and subsequent investigative disclosures have increasingly revealed a pattern of “information speculation”.¹ This is a practice where threat assessments are systematically inflated, localized insurgencies are conflated with global networks, and complex political realities are erased to align with the strategic requirements of paying governments.¹

The culmination of this trajectory has manifested in Sri Lanka, where disclosures in the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court and the February 25, 2026, arrest of former State Intelligence Service chief Suresh Salley have exposed the real-world consequences of Gunaratna’s scholarship.⁴ Far from being an objective academic, Gunaratna is increasingly understood to have functioned as an active agent of state disinformation, constructing defensive narratives to shield the Sri Lankan deep state from complicity in the catastrophic 2019 Easter Sunday terror attacks.⁶

The Chameleon of Counterterrorism

Gunaratna’s career demonstrates a predictable pattern of shifting analytical conclusions to match the exact political, military, and ideological agendas of the states that employ him.¹ He is an ideological chameleon who translates state-sponsored intelligence into academic currency.¹ To understand the breadth of this transactional scholarship, it is necessary to examine his shifting threat constructs across regional jurisdictions, as outlined in Table 1.

Table 1: Jurisdictional Analysis of Gunaratna’s Shift in Threat Constructs

The Washington and London Pipeline: Global Threat Hyperbole

The foundational architecture of Gunaratna’s international prestige was established in the immediate wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States with the publication of his book, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror.¹ This volume, widely promoted by Western media outlets hungry for analytical clarity, positioned Gunaratna as a leading authority on transnational jihad.¹ However, critical evaluations by scholarly peers soon revealed that the book’s definitive-sounding assertions rested on highly fragile empirical foundations.¹

Academic critics noted that Gunaratna consistently hyper-inflated the threat of globalized, highly interconnected terrorist cells to satisfy the ideological demands of the United States and United Kingdom defense establishments under the Bush and Blair administrations.¹ Rather than conducting rigorous field verification, Gunaratna relied extensively on uncorroborated, filtered intelligence briefings and interrogation transcripts supplied by state intelligence agencies.¹ He reproduced these perspectives without questioning the strategic intent or biases of his sources.¹

This uncritical reliance led to major factual errors. For example, he claimed that Jemaah Islamiyah’s operational mastermind, Hambali, had visited Australia a dozen times—a claim immediately and publicly refuted by Australian intelligence authorities.¹ Furthermore, so tenuous were some of the book’s empirical connections that Gunaratna’s own publisher inserted an extraordinary warning, advising readers that references to certain organizations having contact with Al-Qaeda should be treated as mere suggestions that they were “unwitting tools” rather than active participants.¹

Beyond empirical inaccuracy, Gunaratna’s scholarship served to legitimize state violence and extra-legal operations.¹ He actively advocated that law enforcement and intelligence agencies operating in the war on terror must be “goal-oriented and not rule-oriented,” effectively encouraging the abandonment of international legal frameworks and domestic civil liberties.¹ He praised extra-judicial assassination techniques, such as the Central Intelligence Agency’s targeted missile strikes in Yemen, despite the high toll of civilian casualties and the erosion of international legal norms.¹

To sustain his access to high-level defense corridors, Gunaratna engaged in systematic self-legitimization, a practice exposed in a public controversy detailed by the Australian newspaper The Age on July 20, 2003.¹ Investigations into his curriculum vitae revealed that he had exaggerated his official credentials to build academic authority. Table 2 outlines the discrepancies between Gunaratna’s claimed international appointments and the verified realities.

Table 2: Discrepancies in Gunaratna’s Professional Credentials

This massaging of his credentials bypassed traditional peer-review mechanisms, allowing Gunaratna to operate as an independent “information speculator” who translated state-supplied intelligence into academic currency.¹

The Canberra and Singapore Matrix: The Regional Bogeyman

As the geopolitical focus of the War on Terror expanded, Gunaratna pivoted to Southeast Asia, securing a highly influential academic and policy foothold in Singapore.³ In February 2004, the Singapore government inaugurated the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) at Nanyang Technological University, with Gunaratna installed as its founding director.³ Operating from this state-linked platform, he tailored his analytical output to match the domestic and regional security agendas of the Singaporean and Australian governments.¹

In this regional context, Gunaratna hyper-focused on Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and the threat of localized radicalization in Southeast Asia.¹ He routinely argued that Singapore and Australia were under imminent threat from a sprawling, regional terror network directly linked to Al-Qaeda.¹ Critics observed that this analysis was built on a narrow selection of sources.¹ Out of 25 citations in his foundational chapter on Indonesia, 10 referenced filtered Indonesian intelligence briefs and eight cited generic press reports, showing a profound lack of historical depth regarding Indonesian military operations and their internal political dynamics.¹

For example, Gunaratna asserted that the devastating church bombings on Christmas Eve in 2000 were exclusive Al-Qaeda operations.¹ He ignored superior research by Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group, which exposed complex links between Indonesian military intelligence and localized extremist figures.¹ By treating Indonesian intelligence agencies as objective sources, Gunaratna ignored their historical involvement in inciting local violence to justify their own institutional dominance.¹

This analytical framework provided academic legitimacy for the expansion of regional state power.⁷ In Singapore, his warnings of imminent threat helped justify the continued use of the Internal Security Act (ISA)—which permits indefinite detention without trial—alongside invasive domestic surveillance programs and the introduction of highly restrictive border control measures like biometric passports.⁷

However, this state-centric security framework exacerbated deep-seated structural anxieties within Singapore’s minority Muslim community.¹⁶ While Gunaratna’s research focused almost exclusively on religious ideology as the sole driver of radicalization, local Muslim organizations pointed to persistent domestic grievances.¹⁶ These included:

• The systematic underrepresentation of Muslims in sensitive appointments within the Singapore Armed Forces ¹⁶;
• The introduction of compulsory national education policies that threatened the autonomy of traditional Islamic schools (madrasahs) ¹⁶;
• Broad communal resentment over Singapore’s close alignment with United States foreign policy, particularly regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq and uncritical support for Israel.¹⁶

By externalizing the threat of terrorism and framing it purely as a product of foreign jihadist ideology, Gunaratna’s scholarship allowed regional governments to avoid addressing these domestic socio-political inequalities.¹⁶

The Israeli Doctrine: The Weaponization of Counterterrorism Rhetoric

When engaging with or mirroring Israeli counter-terrorism frameworks, Gunaratna’s rhetoric adopted a hardline doctrine.¹ In this framework, complex ethno-nationalist struggles are viewed strictly through the lens of irredeemable global Islamic extremism, erasing historical, political, and material context.¹

This analytical approach was of critical importance because it provided state clients with a theoretical template to delegitimize any form of political negotiation with insurgent groups.¹ By framing resistance movements not as political entities with localized grievances, but as irrational, apocalyptic networks linked to global terror syndicates, Gunaratna provided academic cover for states to reject peace talks in favor of total military eradication.¹

He leaned heavily into this doctrine when advising the Sri Lankan government during its civil war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).¹ Gunaratna advocated for better counter-insurgency training and the complete militarization of the conflict, dismissing calls for structured political negotiations or constitutional reforms to address Tamil grievances.¹ His adoption of the Israeli doctrine served to normalize state violence and systemic human rights abuses under the guise of an existential struggle against global extremism.¹

The Sri Lankan Nexus: Shielding the Deep State

While his international work showcases geopolitical opportunism, it is Gunaratna’s actions in his home country of Sri Lanka that expose the most dangerous consequences of his information speculation.¹ On April 21, 2019, coordinated suicide bombings struck three churches and three luxury hotels in Sri Lanka, killing 279 people, including 45 foreign nationals and five United States citizens.⁴

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Gunaratna launched a massive media campaign and published a book, Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for the International Community (2023).⁶ His thesis was absolute: the bombings were exclusively the work of the Islamic State (ISIS) acting through localized ideology.⁶ He traced the genesis of the attack to Abu Shuraih Sailani, a Sri Lankan recruit killed in Syria in July 2015, and a core group of 41 Sri Lankan Muslims who had traveled to join the caliphate.¹¹ Gunaratna asserted that the state’s intelligence services could not be blamed for the tragedy, framing the event purely as a failure of political oversight rather than deep-state complicity.²¹

However, this narrative of external ideological radicalization has been completely dismantled by investigative and judicial disclosures.⁴ In 2023, the Sri Lankan Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling holding top officials, including former President Maithripala Sirisena and intelligence chiefs Nilantha Jayawardene and Pujith Jayasundara, personally liable for failing to act on highly specific warnings sent by Indian intelligence agencies prior to the attacks.⁶

The conspiracy deepened in 2023 when a documentary by British broadcaster Channel 4 featured Hanzeer Azad Maulana, a former insider within the pro-government paramilitary group Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP).⁴ Maulana alleged that he had personally brokered a meeting in 2018 between members of the National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ)—the group that carried out the bombings—and Suresh Salley, then a military intelligence official.⁴ According to Maulana, the conspiracy was designed to create nationwide insecurity to pave the way for a national security “strongman,” Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to win the presidential election later that year.⁴

Subsequent investigations by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and independent reports from outlets like Lanka e News corroborated these allegations, exposing a 65 million LKR payment made by military intelligence to the bombers.⁶ Once in power, the Rajapaksa administration escalated state surveillance, weaponized COVID-19 rules to enforce forced cremations on Muslim communities, and systematically blocked domestic investigations into military complicity.⁶

These developments reveal that Gunaratna’s immediate and aggressive promotion of the “ISIS-only” narrative was not an objective academic assessment.⁶ Instead, it served as a sophisticated cover-up designed to steer the international community away from investigating domestic state complicity and the role of military intelligence in orchestrating the national crisis.⁶

The Batticaloa Prison Visits: Mechanics of Collusion

The extent of Gunaratna’s integration into these state-backed intelligence operations is illustrated by disclosures made by the CID to the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court.⁴ While the former Chief Minister of the Eastern Province and leader of the TMVP paramilitary group, Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan (better known as “Pillayan”), was imprisoned at the Batticaloa Prison, Gunaratna visited him secretly on three occasions.⁶

Gunaratna did not conduct these prison visits alone.²³ He was accompanied by two female companions, one of whom was subsequently recruited directly into the Sri Lanka Army with the rank of Major.²³ Crucially, prison logs and witness testimonies from inside the Batticaloa Prison revealed that during this exact timeframe, high-ranking members of the NTJ bomb cell were brought directly into Pillayan’s prison ward for highly secretive conversations.⁴

These visits suggest that Gunaratna was not acting as an academic researcher conducting standard interviews. Instead, his presence and connections, which facilitated the commissioning of an army officer, indicate that he was directly embedded in the intelligence operations coordinating relationships between state military intelligence, pro-government paramilitaries, and the extremist bombers.⁴

To conceptualize how this disinformation network functioned, Table 3 maps the structural mechanics of the “Easter Sunday Disinformation Loop.”

Table 3: The Easter Sunday Disinformation Loop

The Facade Crumbles: Accountability and Judicial Reckoning

The consequences of Gunaratna’s intelligence speculation extend beyond academic debate, directly impacting the lives of vulnerable populations, particularly the Tamil diaspora.²⁶ In May 2021, Gunaratna appeared as an expert witness before the United Kingdom Upper Tribunal, testifying on behalf of state authorities seeking to deport Tamil asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka.²⁶

During his testimony, Gunaratna argued that the Sri Lankan state’s database of suspected LTTE sympathizers was “detailed and elaborate”.²⁶ He asserted that while there was a “gradient” of severity, even low-level individuals suspected of minor offenses would be monitored but not subjected to extra-legal harm, thereby claiming it was safe to return failed asylum seekers.²⁶

The UK Upper Tribunal judges scathingly rejected Gunaratna’s testimony.²⁶ The court noted that his uncritical defense of the Sri Lankan security apparatus ignored extensive, documented evidence of systemic torture, arbitrary detention, and human rights violations carried out under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA).²⁶ Human rights organizations had repeatedly documented how the PTA was weaponized to target and detain activists, families of the disappeared, and minority Tamil and Muslim populations.⁶ By presenting the Sri Lankan state’s surveillance and databases as professional and benign, Gunaratna attempted to provide academic cover for the forced return (refoulement) of asylum seekers to a regime actively engaged in systematic human rights abuses.²⁶

The terminal decline of Gunaratna’s academic authority was highlighted when investigative journalists confronted him directly regarding the grave disclosures in the Fort Magistrate’s Court. His customary academic certainty completely vanished. When asked to explain his secret prison visits to Pillayan and his connections to military intelligence operations, Gunaratna could only state that he would “need to study the issue” before providing a response.

This personal evasion occurred alongside a broader institutional reckoning. On February 25, 2026, the Criminal Investigation Department officially arrested retired Army Major General Suresh Salley.⁴ Salley’s arrest, stemming from his direct links to and security lapses surrounding the 2019 bombings, represents a major collapse of the official state narrative.⁴ The arrest confirmed that the threat was not merely a product of decentralized global jihad, but was deeply embedded within the state’s own intelligence structures.⁴

Conclusion: The Structural Perils of Transactional Expertise

The career of Rohan Gunaratna serves as a warning about the structural dangers of treating national security analysis as a transactional service.¹ By tailoring his assessments to the specific geopolitical and domestic requirements of his state clients—whether by hyper-inflating the global threat of Al-Qaeda for Western defense establishments, amplifying regional radicalization in Southeast Asia to justify domestic surveillance, or defending the Sri Lankan deep state from complicity in mass casualty attacks—Gunaratna has demonstrated how easily academic credentials can be leveraged to support state security agendas.¹

The gradual unravelling of his credibility in the Sri Lankan courts and the arrest of key intelligence figures like Suresh Salley illustrate that the “ISIS-only” narrative was not an objective academic conclusion.⁴ Instead, it functioned as a sophisticated cover-up designed to insulate a militarized deep state from accountability.⁶

When academic institutions and policy think tanks operate as extensions of state intelligence services, they cease to function as spaces of objective, critical inquiry. To prevent the further erosion of public trust and protect vulnerable populations from state-sponsored violence, the international community and academic institutions must reject this model of transactional expertise, demanding transparent, independent, and peer-verified standards of research in global security studies.¹

This article was co-authored by Kagusthan Ariaratnam, Gemini, and Google DeepMind.

About the Authors

• Kagusthan Ariaratnam is a seasoned professional at the intersection of technology and innovation, bringing deep industry expertise and strategic vision to the exploration of complex digital landscapes.

• Gemini is a state-of-the-art multimodal AI model from Google. Designed to process and reason across various types of information—including text, code, audio, image, and video—it serves as an adaptive collaborator in research, creativity, and problem-solving.

• Google DeepMind is a world-leading AI research laboratory committed to solving intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity. By developing increasingly capable and general-purpose AI systems, DeepMind continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in the digital age.

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