Blog

A VOX-Pol workshop, organised in collaboration with ICSR, entitled ‘Online Jihadism: Beyond the English-Language Literature’ was hosted at King’s College London on 16 – 17 October. Contributors included counter-radicalisation experts, anthropologists, political scientists, and Islamic Studies scholars. Over 90 attendees registered for the two-day event. Simultaneous translation was provided in Arabic and French throughout. Social scientists have approached online ...

By Lorand Bodo In recent years, governments and companies have had to respond to the phenomenon of terrorists and other violent extremists using the Internet, especially social media platforms, to propagate their messages and as a tool for radicalisation. For example, the UK government recently proposed to tighten the law concerning the viewing of violent ...

By Sophia Cope, Jillian C. York, and Jeremy Gillula In recent months, social media platforms—under pressure from a number of governments—have adopted new policies and practices to remove content that promotes terrorism. As the Guardian reported, these policies are typically carried out by low-paid contractors (or, in the case of YouTube, volunteers) and with little to ...

By Laurence Bindner, Raphael Gluck This article was originally published in French on Ultima Ratio. Since partly going underground in the deep-web, ISIS exerts continuous pressure to make its propaganda surface on the public web. Adapting constantly to ever more active censorship, ISIS uses the various web platforms in an opportunistic and agile way. Therefore, ...

Dr. Zoey Reeve is joining UCL this September as VOX-Pol’s 2017 – 2018 Research Fellow. Zoey’s research will utilise Social and Evolutionary Psychology theory and methods, to think through and investigate online radicalisation processes.  She will focus particularly on how normal psychological processes and mechanisms can help us understand how and why people engage with ...

By Lorand Bodo The UK think-tank Policy Exchange recently published a new report on the struggle against online jihadist extremism, or what its authors call “the New Netwar”. The report argues that we are currently struggling to find appropriate ways to combat online jihadist extremism and therefore losing the war online against the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS). ...

By Tom Morrison-Bell The encryption debate has reared its head again as the Home Secretary visited the US to meet with tech firms to understand the work being done to tackle extremism. In an article in The Telegraph, the Home Secretary appears to restate the Government’s desire for some sort of back-door to end-to-end encryption ...

The ECPR General Conference was held on 6 — 9 September 2017 in the University of Oslo. The conference attracted scholars from throughout the world and at all stages of their careers. The Academic Programme consisted of lectures, roundtables, and themed sections and panels covering all the main areas of political science, political theory, and international relations. VOX-Pol’s Reem Ahmed (University ...

A joint VOX-Pol-Tech Against Terrorism Dublin Start-up Workshop was held on 7 September 2017 at Dublin City University’s DCUAlpha Innovation Hub. Attendees included representatives from the security, financial technology, and academic sectors. The event kicked off with an overview of Tech Against Terrorism and its purpose and activities. The second session focused on what companies ...

By Maura Conway and Suraj Lakhani This post is based on findings contained in the VOX-Pol report Disrupting Daesh: Measuring Takedown of Online Terrorist Material and its Impacts published on 15 August 2017. Alongside the fierce battles that have been raging of late in key strongholds of so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, intense battles against ...