Marta Furlan

Marta Furlan is Senior Programme Manager for Research at Free the Slaves, an international human rights NGO. She is also a Research Fellow at the Center on Armed Groups in Geneva and the Orion Policy Institute in Washington D.C.

Marta holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of St Andrews (UK), where her research focused on armed non-state actors and civil conflict dynamics. Her research interests also include the human rights impact of climate change, with a special focus on Indigenous communities. She is passionate about community-based participatory action research that involves people in the formulation of solutions.

She is the author of the book Inside Salafi-Jihadist Governance: The Strategies and Characteristics of Islamist Insurgent Rule (Columbia University Press, 2025) and has published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Small Wars & Insurgencies, the Journal of Human Rights Practice and Civil Wars.