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VOX-Pol Blog post.

The threat posed by terrorism today is changing rapidly—as have methods of study of this phenomenon, including analysis of radicalisation and the ‘terrorist cycle’. This chapter takes a qualitative approach to one aspect of contemporary terrorism, self-directed (‘lone wolf’) terrorism by right-wing extremists. Predominately plaguing the USA at first, solo actor terrorism by fascist extremists crossed the Atlantic in 1999 with David Copeland’s attacks in London, and most horrifically with Anders Behring Breivik’s murder of 77 people in Oslo and Utøya in 2011. Like these two terrorist murderers, the two case studies discussed here, Neil Lewington and Ian Davison, were also radicalised online through ‘passive’ and ‘active’ networks of support. Although interdicted before committing acts of terrorism, the different pathways of online radicalisation by Lexington and Davison are the central subject here.

This report represents a distillation of current Social, Behavioural and Economic research findings on violent extremism: What is the cultural basis for violent extremism and radicalization? What motivates individuals and groups to violence, and how is that risk measured? How does our understanding of these findings educate the mitigation of extremism? Can it be prevented or reversed? These and other topics are outlined here to open a forward-looking dialog in the research and policy community that will be crucial to formulating future research direction and for addressing this pressing national concern.

This report presents the analysis of a corpus of academic and grey literature relevant to a key
challenge facing our society. How can media and communications be used to counter identity-based
violence (IBV) or Violent Extremism (VE)?
Part I focuses on “Counter-Narratives”, looking at the evidence relating to strategic policy
communication strategies and counter-propaganda techniques. This reflects literature from
policymakers, think-tanks, and civil society initiatives rather than the academic literature base.
Key findings include the following:
• Current literature and policy concerned with countering propaganda is dominated by the language
of ‘counter-narratives’ but a common understanding of this relatively new lexicon has yet to emerge.
• There is little hard evidence that proves interaction with VE content leads to participation in VE
activities.
• The hypothesis that VE narratives or the real life threat of VE can be countered by an alternative set
of communications is an assumption that remains unproven.
These findings challenge claims that responding to propaganda strategies by firing back
with “counter-narratives” can be effective.
Part II looks at “Alternative Approaches” to the use of the media to counter violent extremism,
drawing on insights from the “media development” and “media assistance” sectors, and research
into whether mass media and new communication interventions can inhibit identity-based violence
in certain crisis situations. Key findings include the following:
• The theoretical foundations for these alternative approaches are supported by a stronger and more
established research base, drawn from the multi-disciplinary fields of development, peace building,
and social cohesion.
• Media projects have less impact if seen to be linked to a political agenda.
• A growing evidence base suggests that radio and television drama addressing issues of identity,
reconciliation and tolerance have a positive an impact on public attitudes and behaviour.
• Media assistance can ensure that local and domestic media can respond appropriately to VE
narratives.
• There is an emerging evidence base regarding the potential for rapid reaction media and
communication strategies in situations where there is a threat of IBV.
These findings suggest that alternative media strategies can help. But the trust and credibility of
information providers is crucial.
The final section “Reflections” concludes that the research landscape is fragmented and disconnected.
but suggests several professional/practitioner sectors and academic disciplines could shed light on
potentially effective media and communication CVE strategies.
More needs to be done to draw the threads together to learn lessons and to identify and prioritise
gaps in our knowledge and understanding.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Much research aims to detect online radical content mainly using
radicalisation glossaries, i.e., by looking for terms and expressions associated with
religion, war, offensive language, etc. However, such crude methods are highly
inaccurate towards content that uses radicalisation terminology to simply report on
current events, to share harmless religious rhetoric, or even to counter extremism.
Language is complex and the context in which particular terms are used should not
be disregarded. In this paper, we propose an approach for building a representation
of the semantic context of the terms that are linked to radicalised rhetoric. We
use this approach to analyse over 114K tweets that contain radicalisation-terms
(around 17K posted by pro-ISIS users, and 97k posted by “general” Twitter users).
We report on how the contextual information differs for the same radicalisationterms
in the two datasets, which indicate that contextual semantics can help to
better discriminate radical content from content that only uses radical terminology.
The classifiers we built to test this hypothesis outperform those that disregard
contextual information.