Blog

by Helen Vatsikopoulos At the ongoing coronial inquest into the deaths arising from last year’s Lindt café siege in Sydney, experts cannot agree whether Man Haron Monis was a radicalised terrorist or a mentally unstable lone wolf who used radical Islam as a “crutch”. Throughout the inquest, prosecutors, solicitors and detectives are being grilled about ...

by Steven Luckert In 1924, Adolf Hitler described propaganda as “a terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.” For two decades, the Nazis showed the world what a devastating weapon it could be. They won over millions of Germans to their extremist goals in a democracy by branding their movement with powerful symbols and ...

This Autumn, the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence invites you to a series of Lunchtime Briefing Seminars, each exploring a different aspect of Violent Online Political Extremism. Sessions run each week, with themes covered including lone actor terrorists and online influences; IS, social media, and violent online Jihad; the Internet and the extreme right; female IS ...

by Andrew Murray Last week reports emerged in the media that the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill may lead to the banning of popular communications apps Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This was in many ways not news as the same reports had appeared in January but with the Home Secretary announcing that the Bill would be published in the ...

VOX-Pol’s Dr. Kate Coyer, also Director of the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary participated in the “Media Freedom and Responsibilities in the Context of Counter-Terrorism Policies” workshop organised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Bucharest, Romania from 7- 8 October 2015. The workshop focussed ...

By Irene McGinn and Adam Joinson This blog post explores the reasons why some online ideological groups take action while others do not and focuses on to what extent the online communications of ideological groups contribute to direct collective action. In order to address this question, we examined a number of online groups using a variety of ...

VOX-Pol’s inaugural week-long Training Academy took place in Valencia, Spain from Monday, 21 September, 2015 to Friday, 25 September, 2015. The event was designed to provide policymakers, law enforcement, social media companies, and others professionally tasked with responding to violent online extremism and terrorism with an introduction to the role of the Internet in contemporary ...

VOX-Pol Programme Manager and Research Fellow, Lisa McInerney, participated in CYBERSEC, the European Cybersecurity Forum which was held from 28-29 September in Krakow, Poland. In one of the military breakout sessions on ‘Cyberthreats: New Dimensions of Conflicts in Europe, Lisa’s contribution focused upon ‘Islamic State’ online capabilities and operations. ...

VOX-Pol Research Fellow Dr. Nico Prucha is quoted extensively in a piece entitled ‘Fighting ISIS Online’ published yesterday (30 Sept. 2015) by MIT Technology Review. The article’s author, David Talbot, describes how the Islamic State (IS) has mastered the use of online propaganda and recruitment via the internet. Dr. Prucha explains in the piece how ...

by Massimo Leone On the one hand, terrorism is the antithesis of communication. It does not aim at transmitting any message to its victims, but at annihilating them. On the other hand, yet, terrorism is extremely powerful communication for those who witness the tragedy, directly or through the media, and are either terrified or fascinated ...