Blog

by Pete Brown “And so it begins … ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police,” blared the headline on the Conservative Post; “with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed”. The image in question purported to show a group of Syrian refugees holding ISIS flags and attacking German police officers. For those resistant ...

by David Donaldson The Australian Defence Force’s latest initiative in the war on the Islamic State, a Twitter account disputing “Daesh lies”, builds on lessons from the problems encountered by earlier attempts at countering IS propaganda — but nobody really knows if it will work. The @fight_DAESH account, which became the object of unwanted attention when ...

by Thomas Hegghammer I have studied jihadism online for nearly 15 years, and I have never seen jihadis exploit the Internet with greater ease, effectiveness and impunity than they do today. The past five years have seen a veritable collapse in the policing of extremist activity online, and I believe this has contributed significantly to ...

Course Date: July 4-9, 2016 Organized by the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) at the Central European University (CEU) and VOX-Pol Network of Excellence Course Director(s): Eva Bognar (Center for Media, Data and Society at SPP of CEU, Budapest, Hungary) Maura Conway (Law and Government, Dublin City University, Ireland) Kate Coyer (Center for Media, Data and Society at SPP ...

by Aaron Y Zelin Over the years, I identified the pace at which a jihadi group releases content as one of the general indicators of its health. When AQAP and AQIM were in control of territory, they were churning out a lot more content than after they withdrew. Similarly, as Ansar al-Sharia in Libya lost ...

The discourse of violent online radicalisation has been mainstreamed, being increasingly prevalent in both policy circles and media representations. On 8 – 9 March 2016, VOX-Pol will convene a workshop at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH) on critiquing the discourse of violent online radicalisation. The objective ...

by Carl Miller In June, the SAS and heavily armed police poured onto the streets of London. Fire brigade and paramedics appeared wearing flak jackets and explosions, sirens and automatic gunfire drowned out the sounds of the early morning commute. Men with balaclavas were seen running from building to building, and into Aldwych tube station. ...

On 8 December VOX-Pol launched our Online Library, an exciting new research and teaching resource, on its website: www.voxpol.eu. The Library currently has over 250 publications related to various aspects of Violent Online Political Extremism included within it, which makes it the biggest such collection available in one place online today. Users can download all open ...

VOX-Pol Coordinator Dr. Maura Conway (DCU) participated in a panel discussion at the final day of the Internet Leadership Academy in Dublin on 4 December. The Academy was convened by our VOX-Pol partner, the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), together with Google, with the aim of providing an objective overview of all sides of the major policy debates shaping ...

by Andres Guadamuz The announcement that hacktivist collective Anonymous has declared war on the Islamic State has been received positively by the public. After the Paris attack some may think governments are not doing enough to protect civilians, so at least it seems someone is doing something about the terrorist threat. So far the group ...