Journal
Documenting Acts of Cruelty
September 18, 2023The substantive focus of this article is a small collection of image-based case studies of significant criminal acts of interpersonal cruelty that are now in the public domain. In all instances those engaged in criminal acts of violence record and document aspects of their own behavior. The case studies range from military personnel and terrorists ...
Technological Skills of White Supremacists in an Online Forum: A Qualitative Examination
September 18, 2023Research surrounding radicalization to and use of violence among extremist and terror groups has expanded over the last decade. There are still fundamental questions that must be addressed, particularly regarding the role of the Internet in radicalisation and recruitment as well as general technological skill within extremist groups. Few studies have considered this issue, especially ...
Communicating war in Mali, 2012: On-offline networked political agency in times of conflict
September 18, 2023The Arab Spring raised high expectations for political freedom, especially for situations in which the rapid development of ICT intersects with political oppression and rebellion, as was the case in Mali, West Africa. In 2012 the country’s northern part fell into the hands of ‘rebels’ and jihadists were on the rise. This article tries to ...
Pathways to Violent Extremism in the Digital Era
September 18, 2023The Internet is often singled out as the key means through which extremists and terrorists are radicalised. Yet, argue Charlie Edwards and Luke Gribbon, research thus far has fallen short of unearthing the actual mechanisms through which this radicalisation takes place. Using examples from a wider study, they explore different ways in which individuals have ...
Finding the Far Right Online: An Explanatory study of White Supremacist Websites
September 18, 2023White supremacists and the Far Right political movement in the UK have, had considerable success in spreading their messages through Web sites. Some of these Web sites clearly contribute to an enabling environment for racially motivated violence in our towns and cities and possibly help to underpin also the rise of, and support for, the ...
Taking al-Qaeda’s Jihad to Facebook
September 18, 2023Outlines how Facebook is used by jihadists, analyses Facebook by conducting search using keywords such as “jihad”, “al-Qaeda” and “Bin Laden” ...
Detecting Linguistic Markers for Radical Violence in Social Media
September 18, 2023Lone-wolf terrorism is a threat to the security of modern society, as was tragically shown in Norway on July 22, 2011, when Anders Behring Breivik carried out two terrorist attacks that resulted in a total of 77 deaths. Since lone wolves are acting on their own, information about them cannot be collected using traditional police ...
IRA 2.0: Continuing the Long War—Analyzing the Factors Behind Anti-GFA Violence
September 18, 2023Despite an increasing number of attacks by violent anti-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) Republicans from 2009 there is still relatively little understanding of the nature of these organizations or the likely longevity of their campaign(s). This analysis argues that the current upsurge of violence is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, due to a combination ...
Exploring the Form and Function of Dissident Irish Republican Online Discourses
September 18, 2023This article seeks to contribute to broadening the focus of research in the area of violent online political extremism by examining the use of the internet by dissident Irish Republicans and their supporters. The argument here is not that the internet substitutes face-to-face contacts amongst Irish Republicans, including violent dissidents, nor that it currently plays ...
What’s Love Got To Do With It? Framing ‘JihadJane’ in the US Press
September 18, 2023The purpose of this article is to compare and contrast the US press coverage accorded to female terrorist plotter, Colleen LaRose, with that of two male terrorist plotters in order to test whether assertions in the academic literature regarding media treatment of women terrorists stand up to empirical scrutiny. The authors employed TextSTAT software to ...