Counterterrorism

The proliferation of extremist, jihadist and violence-inciting websites, blogs and channels in social media has long since become a major theme in security policy. Extremists and terrorists use the new technological tools to communicate with each other, to organise themselves and to publicise their ideas. Whereas terrorists in the previous millennium were still dependent on ...

“Never before in history have terrorists had such easy access to the minds and eyeballs of millions,” declared one journalistic account of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine and proficient use of Twitter, Facebook, bots, and other modern means of getting its message out. Such views that the group’s “mastery of modern digital tools” has transformed ...

Between 2006 and 2012, two men working on opposite sides of the struggle between global jihadis and the United States faced of in New York City. One was the founder of Revolution Muslim, a group which proselytized—online and on New York streets—on behalf of al-Qa`ida. The other led eforts to track the terrorist threat facing ...

Terrorism researchers have long sought to identify methods for challenging terrorist ideologies. The construction and dissemination of counternarratives has begun to receive substantial attention as a means of doing so. However, the effectiveness of this approach is contingent on message targets’ trust in the counternarrative’s content and source. This article draws from literatures on trust ...

The use of the Internet, particularly social media, by violent extremists and terrorists and their supporters received an increasing amount of attention from policymakers, media, Internet companies, and civil society organisations in 2017. In addition to politicians stepping-up their rhetoric regarding the threat posed by consumption of and networking around violent extremist and terrorist online ...

The present article examines the relevance of jihadist propaganda as an indicator of the threat from terrorism. To that end, it uses jihadist propaganda output referring to Spain as a case study. It proposes an instrument of measurement based on content analysis, in which the origin, format, content, and distribution method of the materials are ...

The study aims to capture links between the use of encrypted communication channel -Telegram and lone wolf attacks occurred in Europe between 2015-2016. To understand threads of ISIS communication on Telegram we used digital ethnography approach which consists of the self-observation of information flows on four of ISIS’s most celebrated telegram Channels. We draw on ...

Policy Exchange’s new report provides a comprehensive analysis of the struggle against online jihadist extremism – what we call “the new Netwar”. This issue is vital to UK national security and there is a danger that the blood and treasure we are investing in defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria will produce little more than ...

The discourse surrounding digital technologies is rapidly changing, namely from an entity with the potential to generate positive political change to one that can be abused by extremists. In light of this, a new “dispositif” of risk has emerged whereby governments are seeking to address the imagined dangers posed by digital technology through a series ...

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