Council of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and, since 2016, Kepel is a member of the advisory board of the Berlin-based Middle East think tank Candid Foundation. In February 2016 he was appointed chairman of the newly founded Program of Excellence on the Mediterranean and the Middle East at Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) University, based at Ecole Normale Supérieure. He is in charge of the monthly seminar on “Violence and Dogma: Territories and representations of contemporary Islam”. In 2017, Kepel was one of the seven public figures mentioned by , the jihadi terrorist who murdered a policeman and his wife in front of their son in 2016 Magnanville terrorist attack. Since January 2018, Gilles Kepel is professor at the Paris Sciences & Lettres University. He is also director of the Middle Eastern Mediterranean Freethinking Platform at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland where, since September 2018, he is an adjunct professor. The MEM Summer Summit is held every August, gathering young change-makers from the Middle East Mediterranean region. In October 2018, he published Sortir du Chaos, Les crises en Méditerranée et au Moyen Orient. The book was translated into English by Henry Randolph and published in the US in 2020 by Columbia University Press as : Away from Chaos. The Middle East and the Challenge to the West. It is a sweeping political history of four decades of Middle East conflict and its worldwide ramifications. In the months following the publication, Gilles Kepel participated in webinars organized on both sides of the Atlantic and the English Channel, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Al Monitor, the Center on National Security at Fordham University, Cambridge University… The New York Times recommended the book in its 12 new books weekly selection. His last essay, The Prophet and the Pandemic / From the Middle East to Atmospheric Jihadism, just released in French (February 2021), has topped the best-seller lists and is currently being translated into English and a half-dozen languages. The excerpt : The Murder of Samuel Paty, is presently released in the Issue#3 of Liberties Journal (April 27, 2021). Ideas and analyses According to Kepel, jihadi terrorism is caused by "the entrenchment of Salafism", a fundamentalist ideology which most radical elements clashes with the values of Western democracies and "are aiming for the destruction of Europe through civil war". In 2017, Kepel criticized Olivier