Housed in a gleaming new wing of the university’s business school, NCITE is the steward of more than $36.5 million in Homeland Security research and prevention money over the next decade. It funds a slew of projects across 18 partner universities, including a gigantic database of Jan. 6 defendants, as well as a study on how to safely repatriate the American families of Islamic State fighters. Students are also experimenting with technology and artificial intelligence, testing robots and hologram models for counterterrorism use.

Put another way, NCITE is an ideas factory for the transformation that’s happening in the U.S. counterterrorism realm. National security analysts say the post-9/11 fixation on militant Islamist networks made officials slow to recognize a resurgent extreme right, now the most lethal and active domestic threat. The Capitol attack added pressure for a course correction, and in June the Biden administration released the country’s first national strategy to address domestic terrorism.

For researchers like Ligon, the challenge is formidable: how to remake U.S. counterterrorism without the never-ending conflicts and civil liberties violations that are a legacy of the War on Terror. Skeptics doubt it can be done. The American Civil Liberties Union already said, “Biden’s strategy fails to address these wrongs, let alone reverse them.” The right portrays the shift as an attack on ideology rather than crime; the left worries any expanded powers eventually will be used against marginalized communities.