Mollie Saltskog

Mollie Saltskog is a Research Fellow at The Soufan Center. Her areas of expertise include counterterrorism and geopolitics in Central Asia, Chinese foreign policy, white supremacy extremism, and disinformation. Before joining The Soufan Group, she worked as a consultant in the private security sector, helping clients analyze and identify trends in conflicts, insurgencies, and international terrorism. Her portfolio includes the crisis in Ukraine, terrorism trends in China, terrorism financing, and the Syrian civil war. She has briefed both private sector and government actors. 

Mollie has spoken about Salafi-jihadist strategy at security conferences and at a private event for members of the diplomatic community. By invitation, she conducted a closed briefing for the European Defense Attachés in Beijing.

She has published work in Lawfare, National Interest, and Small Wars Journal and has been interviewed by CNBC, VICE News, and The Swedish Daily News. Beyond her professional experience, she is deeply committed to academic research. In 2015 she was awarded the Emirates NBD Middle East Essay Prize for her research on female recruitment to al-Qaeda. She has field research experience in Central Asia, having investigated the Belt and Road Initiative’s impact on religious extremism and political violence.? 

She is a Schwarzman Scholar with a master’s in global affairs from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Awarded a bachelor’s with honors in global affairs from Yale–NUS College in Singapore, she speaks English, Swedish, and Mandarin.