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Nazis at the salad bar: The National Workers’ Alliance and mixed, unclear, and unstable ideology
October 9, 2024By Gerard Gill Recent developments in violent extremism have included an uptick in the salience of mixed, unclear, and unstable (MUU) or ‘salad bar’ ideologies. These are worldviews where numerous, sometimes disparate perspectives combine in a dynamic and evolving manner, resulting in a belief system that is hard to comprehensively define. A growth in MUU ...
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Bangladesh’s political transition viewed as opportunity by Islamic State and al-Qaeda
October 2, 2024By Sean McCafferty and Marjuka Binte Afzal Bangladesh’s recent political turmoil has sparked interest from Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda (AQ), both seeing the regime change as a strategic opportunity. With the government in transition, security reforms needed, and jihadist propaganda targeting Bangladesh, there is a risk of increased jihadist activity during the country’s democratic ...
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Breaking Ground: The EU’s First Far-Right Designation of ‘The Base’ and Its Impact on Online Content
August 2, 2024By Anne Craanen In 2021, two members of The Base (a neo-Nazi accelerationist organisation) were arrested in the Netherlands for membership of a terrorist organisation as well as attempting a terrorist plot on former Prime Minister, Mark Rutte. On Friday 26 July 2024, the European Union (EU) sanctioned The Base as a terrorist organisation under ...
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Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) 2024 Reflections: Effective Cross-Sector Collaboration
July 31, 2024By Katy Vaughan, Hadley Middleton, and Evan James The biennial Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) conference took place at Swansea University’s Bay Campus on 18th and 19th June 2024, with over 250 delegates from more than 20 countries. The event brings together a range of researchers, policymakers and practitioners from a number of different countries ...
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Grievance, Pseudohistory, and AI: A Powerful Recipe for The Generation of Extremist Narratives?
July 17, 2024By Daniel E. Levenson Successful ideologues and leaders in extremist movements have long been aware of the power that misleading, but powerfully Manichean, pseudo-historical narratives can have on audiences. The foundation of this propagandistic material is often rooted in self-serving mythologies which justify the scapegoating of others and validation of the deeply felt grievances that ...
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Unmasking the Dark Side of Humour: Far-Right Strategic Mainstreaming in Memes
June 12, 2024By Ursula Schmid, Heidi Schulze and Antonia Drexel Memes are an important part of social media communication, frequently associated with contemporary (pop)culture. Even though most people use memes for benign purposes, beneath the surface of seemingly innocent jokes lies a darker underbelly: there has been a substantial debate regarding the use of memes to spread ...
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Male-supremacy as a violent political ideology
June 5, 2024By Shannon Zimmerman Last Saturday, a man armed with a large knife entered the Westfield shopping centre at Bondi Junction in Sydney. He proceeded to attack over a dozen people before being killed by a policewoman. Video footage appears to show the attacker avoiding men and targeting women. Five of the six people killed in ...
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The Potential of Short Form Videos as P/CVE Messages
May 8, 2024By Joe Whittaker, Farangiz Atamuradova, Kamil Yilmaz, Simon Copeland, Lilah El Sayed, Jon Deedman Short form video has, put simply, become one of the most popular social media formats on the Internet. By “short form” we mean videos of around 30-90 seconds; each platform that utilises it has their own specifications about the minimum and ...
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Documenting Andrew Tate – learning from documentary film
April 17, 2024By Nick Robinson Introduction With over 11bn views on TikTok and accusations that his extreme views are creating real world harm, Andrew Tate’s rise has precipitated alarm amongst policy makers, the media and the public and is symptomatic of the ‘growing visibility of online “manfluencers” who espouse extreme masculine ideals and share them with their ...
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Reflecting on Hizb ut-Tahrir’s 2024 ban in the UK: exploring the group’s ideology and tactics
April 3, 2024By Elisa Orofino Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT, literally “the Party of Liberation”) stands as one of the most long-living, transnational Islamist groups inspiring movements and organisations around the world since its inception in 1953 in Palestine. While no official figures on the membership have ever been published, it seems fair to state the HT is currently ...