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By Joel Wing More than half of Mosul has fallen to Iraqi government forces and it is only a matter of time before the whole city is retaken. How is the Islamic State portraying this defeat? Has it changed its messaging since the start of the battle? Charlie Winter, a Senior Research Fellow at the ...

By Yannick Veilleux-Lepage The recent car-and-knife attack in London was just the latest in a string of high-profile incidents where assailants have used vehicles as deadly weapons. This type of attack has over the past few years become a feature of violent terrorism in the West and elsewhere – so where did it come from, and ...

This post is Part 3 of 3; Part I is HERE and Part II HERE. Also, a PDF combining all three posts is available HERE  Collectively, the results from the open source data analysis presented in Part I and the findings from the police data contained in Post II highlight the need to focus upon ...

This post is Part 2 of 3; Part I is HERE. Background Last week’s post—part I of three in this series—presented findings on convicted UK terrorists’ online behaviours from a large scale analysis based on open source data. Follow-up research on the antecedent behaviours, including online activities, of UK-based lone-actor terrorists leading up to their ...

This post is Part 1 of 3. Background Previous research on terrorist use of the Internet generally discusses the opportunities offered by the Internet to terrorist groups. Such accounts implicitly view the interaction between the Internet and the user as uni-directional (i.e. exposure to Internet content may cause behaviour change). This lacks an acknowledgement that not ...

By Joe Whittaker There seems to be near-ubiquity between discussion of radicalisation to violent extremism and the Internet. Despite this, the study of online radicalisation remains under-researched and as a result ill-understood. This is, perhaps, surprising given the vast attention in the media that is given to the online presence of groups such as Islamic ...

By Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. On International Women’s Day it seems important to recognize strong women and the unique characteristics of women to play important roles in defeating terrorism. In the past days, taking part in the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis Combating Terrorism Conference in New Delhi, India, I had the opportunity to meet and listen to ...

This Blog post is a product of the ESRC-funded Youth Extremisms Research Seminar Series. By Prof. Hilary Pilkington Following significant electoral successes for populist radical right parties and several instances of extraordinary extremist violence, perpetrated by both jihadist and extreme right actors, the attention of scholars, journalists and politicians has understandably focussed upon extremist and radical growth ...

This Blog post is a product of the ESRC-funded Youth Extremisms Research Seminar Series. By Prof. Hilary Pilkington On the heels of significant electoral successes and several instances of extraordinary extremist violence, there has been renewed political, media, and scholarly attention to the growth of extremism in Europe and, in particular, to the role of youth in ...

The Radicalisation Awareness Network’s (RAN) Communications & Narratives’ Working Group meeting on 13 and 14 February, 2017 in Brussels focused on how to measure the impact of an online counter or alternative narrative message; the following post is adapted from the ex-ante paper circulated prior to the meeting, which drew from the Institute for Strategic ...