Welcome to Volume 7 Issue 2 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter.
If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of our newsletter, or any events or research carried out by VOX-Pol, please forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe via our website. Follow us on Twitter @VOX_Pol for live updates and releases.
Yours Sincerely,
The VOX-Pol Team
FEATURED VOX-Pol PUBLICATIONS
VOX-Pol published the translated free-to-access report Wie Extrem ist die Rechte in Europa? Untersuchung von Überschneidungen in der deutschen Rechtsaußenszene auf Twitter, in German in May 2020. Originally launched at a Lunch Briefing Series in Brussels in 2019 and titled in English: How Extreme is the European Far Right? Investigating Overlaps in the German Far Right Scene on Twitter, the report by Reem Ahmed and Daniela Pisoiu discusses discursive overlaps between German ‘extreme’ and ‘radical’ right-wing parties and groups.
NEW: RESEARCHER RESOURCES
VOX-Pol is delighted to launch a new section on our website, titled Researcher Resources. It collects and categorises information for researchers and analysts working in the area of violent online extremism and terrorism, including easy to navigate information on Ethics, Researcher Welfare, Datasets and Tools, Publication Venues, and Podcasts.
Users are encouraged to bookmark the page and share it widely. Explore it HERE.
VOX-Pol ONLINE LIBRARY ANALYSIS
In April 2020 the VOX-Pol team conducted an analysis of the library to find the top journals publishing in the field of violent online political extremism. The results of the analysis are available to read in the blog post Where to Publish Academic Research on Online Extremism and Terrorism?: What We Can Learn from Journal Article Entries in VOX-Pol’s Online Library.
The top three peer-reviewed journals in the discipline are: Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Perspectives on Terrorism. The post also shows the highest ranking journals in which articles on online extremism and terrorism have appeared.
OTHER VOX-Pol RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS
RUSI Special Issue: Strategic Communications in the Contemporary International Landscape
The RUSI Special Issue on Strategic Communications features articles by VOX-Pol researchers and is open access until the end of June 2020. VOX-Pol Coordinator Professor Maura Conway contributed the article Routing the Extreme Right: Challenges for Social Media Platforms, and VOX-Pol Fellow JM Berger along with VOX-Pol alum Sean Looney and Kateira Aryaeinejad contributed There and Back Again: How White Nationalist Ephemera Travels Between Online and Offline Spaces.
A webinar to discuss the Special Issue took place on 27 May 2020 and it can still be viewed on the RUSI website. Maura Conway took part in the online discussion, alongside Nafees Hamid of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, and Alastair Reed of the Cyber Threats Research Centre at Swansea University.
Read the open-access Special Issue HERE.
UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology Report on Online Extremism
VOX-Pol’s Coordinator, Professor Maura Conway, was interviewed for a new report on Online Extremism by the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. This briefing describes how the online environment can be used for extremist purposes, how exposure to online extremism can influence people and potential strategies to counter extremist content online.
A wide variety of VOX-Pol publications wers also cited in the report, including Ian Brown and Josh Cowls’ 2015 VOX-Pol report Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Nick Khaderbhai’s 2017 VOX-Pol report Research Perspectives on Online Radicalisation:A Literature Review 2006–2016, Bharath Ganesh and Jonathan Bright’s (Ed.s) 2020 VOX-Pol report Extreme Digital Speech: Contexts, Responses and Solutions, all of which are free-to-access on our website.
IN THE MEDIA
- False Commentary and Blinkered Perspectives Hampering TCO Progress, Euractive, EURACTIVE, 27 April 2020.
- White Supremacy’s Gateway to the American Mind, The Atlantic, 7 April 2020.