Alex Peter Schmid (born 1943) is a scholar in terrorism studies, who from 1999 to 2005 was Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna. He is particularly known for his work on the definition of terrorism. Schmid has lived and worked mostly in the Netherlands, and , he is research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in The Hague, and among his many other roles, is a director of the Terrorism Research Initiative and editor-in-chief of its journal, Perspectives on Terrorism. Early life and education Alex Peter Schmid was born in Chur, Switzerland, in 1943. He studied history at the University of Zürich and was awarded a PhD from that institution. Career From 1978 until 2018 Schmid worked in various roles at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His first major work on terrorism, Political terrorism: A research guide to concepts, theories, data bases, and literature, was published in 1984. Schmid was an Einstein Fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University (as part of a program funded via the Albert Einstein Institution), Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1986–87, during which time he worked on a revised and expanded edition of his 1984 book Political Terrorism, published in 1988. In 1992 Schmid was associate professor of International Relations at Leiden University, and a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Conflicts, and research director at the PIOOM Foundation (Interdisciplinary Research Programme on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations, 1988–2001). He held the Synthesis Chair on Conflict Resolution at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam in the 1990s, before serving as Officer-in-Charge of the United Nations' Terrorism Prevention Branch, within the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna from 1999 to 2005. In May 2006 he was appointed to a chair in International Relations at St Andrews University, and was at the same time Director of its Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), holding both posts until 2009. From 1 September 2010 to 30 June 2011, he was a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, or KNAW), where he investigated "how courts in a number of countries have been dealing with political offenders in the recent past and how those accused