Cadet Javier Fernandez ’22

Cadet Javier Fernandez, originally from Maple Grove, Minnesota, is a Sociology major and a Terrorism Studies Minor. He served as senior cadet editor for the West Point Journal of Politics and Security and was the senior undergraduate researcher for the New War Research Consortium. His work with the Resnick Center focused on understanding the social structural drivers that enable political extremism and violence in democratic societies. His broader research interests include understanding extremist group/movement organizational and operational structures, and how society’s socio-historical experiences dictate the content and consequences of political extremism and violence, both in the physical and cyber domains. Javier has interned at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism in Washington, D.C. and was a member of the New War Research Consortium – a network of military and civilian academics working understanding the nexus of mis/disinformation and radicalization. He is now in a doctoral program in Sociology at Princeton University after having earned an MA in International Security and Terrorism studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. His current focus includes social movements and collective behavior, as well as statistical inference with text-as-data.