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My first conversation with Islamic State was about my reporting. I had just shared an article I’d written about the terrorist group recruiting Western fighters on my Twitter when I saw that someone using the Twitter handle Abu Omar had also posted a link to the piece on his own account. His profile photo unabashedly ...

By Richard Forno & Anupam Joshi Recently, United States Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work publicly confirmed that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was “dropping cyberbombs,” taking its ongoing battle against the Islamic State group into the online world. Other American officials, including President Barack Obama, have discussed offensive cyber activities, too. The American public has only glimpsed ...

Welcome to Vol. 3, Iss. 2 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. We hope to see many of you at our 22 – 24 June 2016 conference in Dublin. The draft lineup is now online HERE. Register HERE to attend. If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of this newsletter or any events and ...

Full Programme and Schedule   Hot Contemporary Topics: Youth, ‘Lonewolves,’ OSINT #emotion – Youth, Social Media and ISIS Debra Smith: Victoria University Online Violent and Non-violent Radicalisation of Afghan Youth Weeda Mehran: York University The Rise of Open Source Jihad – Autodidactic Lone Wolves or Bumbling Ideological Illiterates Akil Awan: Royal Holloway, University of London ...

By Lisa Kaati and Fredrik Johansson Lone wolf terrorists can come in a variety of shapes and backgrounds and they are in general very hard to detect before they attack. As argued by previous research, there are no clear profiles for lone wolf terrorists since they have a large variation in factors such as social status, ...

Twitter has become a key social media platform used by non-state actors in Syria to send propaganda to the rest of the world. For the most part Twitter has done a good job of clamping down on ISIS presence on the website. Twitter routinely bans ISIS supporter’s accounts and is quite fast at deleting ISIS propaganda ...

By Timothy Holman “I think it’s — there are several networks. There are several facilitators. There are plenty of ways to get information back and forth: go through mosques, go through the Internet, go through phones, and you go through former regime elements that are located in Syria and other countries. There is a vast ...

By Daniel Falkiner Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate provides detailed answers to a number of pressing questions: What exactly is ISIS? Where did it come from? Who is behind it? How does it function? What are the reasons for its success? Daniel Falkiner welcomes the rich description and analysis and finds Abdel Bari Atwan does an admirable job of explaining the ways Islamic ...

Identifying key knowledge gaps in the area of preventing violent extremism was the main focus of a recent EU Radicalisation Awareness Network Centre of Excellence (RAN CoE) research seminar in Vienna (12-13 April 2016). The seminar brought together the RAN editorial board, leading researchers, and practitioners to discuss and debate the latest radicalisation research findings ...

Title Python for Social Scientists Date and time Wednesday, 22 June at 9:00am Conveners Prof. Padraig Cunningham, Dr. Derek Greene, and Dr. Tania Malik – School of Computer Science, University College Dublin Workshop Descriptor This workshop will provide an introduction to Python and Python Notebooks for Social Scientists. At the end of the workshop participants will have ...