Violent Jihadism

Before the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) leveraged the Internet into a truly modern quasi-state propaganda machine through horrendous online videos, travel handbooks, and sophisticated Twitter messengering, more humble yet highly effective precursors targeted youthful Western Muslims for radicalism, during a time when home grown plots peaked. These brash new entrants into ...

The 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 ...

The key aims of this report are: To show how Jihadist movements use web forums to consolidate their existing followers and to recruit new ones; to illustrate how Jihadists, and their online supporters, use theology and ideology to justify their violent actions; and to suggest how western governments can better challenge the worldview and ideology ...

The troublesome question of how and whether to consider what are commonly referred to as Lone Wolf terrorists within the broader roster of terrorist groups is something that has regularly confounded security analysts for a variety of reasons. This article attempts to create some sort of typology to start to define the group, with specific ...

Outlines how Facebook is used by jihadists, analyses Facebook by conducting search using keywords such as “jihad”, “al-Qaeda” and “Bin Laden” ...

Policy advice for EU member states on how to tackle jihadist online recruitment techniques. ...

The 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 ...

A summary of the current understanding of the role of the Internet in relation to extremist and terrorist networks. The paper was prepared by the ISD and the Policy Planners’ Network on Countering Radicalisation and Polarisation (PPN) – Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK. ...

This thesis examines why approximately 700 German foreign fighters traveled to Syria and Iraq between early 2012 and late 2015. It presents the author’s original research on 99 German foreign fighter profiles, examining their preexisting network connections in Germany as well as their biographical availability and integration into German society. The study finds that German ...

Content analysis of the posts from eleven Facebook accounts of known Dutch and Belgian foreign fighters (in Dutch). English summary is available here: http://leidensafetyandsecurityblog.nl/articles/foreign-fighters-on-social-media-an-analysis-of-11-facebook-accounts ...