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VOX-Pol Blog post.

The ‘involuntary celibates’, or men who have been unable to find romantic or sexual relationships with women despite wanting to, have congregated in the online incel community. Though initially supportive in nature, the community has become a hotbed for (violent) online misogyny. My ongoing virtual ethnographic research focuses on the nature of the incel community and its members, and how the community plays a role in online misogynistic radicalization. To this end, this contribution applies Bayerl et al.’s Radicalisation-Factor Model and its four interlinked factors—the individual, the environment, the radical groups and ideology, and technologies—to the incel community. This adjusted framework find its basis in existing insights from domains such as (online) radicalization, social psychology, scholarship of gender, masculinity and misogyny, and is further inspired by ongoing non-participatory observations on incel forums. By approaching the incel phenomenon from different perspectives, this framework has the aim of providing a holistic understanding of the incel community as well as highlighting the importance of the interplay of various individual, ideological, contextual and technological features in the process of online radicalization.

This article explores the results of a study on media participation on Twitter in 2018/2019 perceived as contributing to far right and Islamist radical ideologies, in 7 European countries. By combining online ethnography and big data approaches, we see that online far right extremism in Europe is active and ranks are growing, while Islamist extremism has been incapacitated in sharing controversial forms of expression. We describe how the far right uses Twitter as a means for political activism, while Islamist extremists offer lifestyle information, related to local branches of faith, using Twitter as a storefront that re-routes users to other platforms. We consider resources for action, notably on the far right. World leaders influence followers online and support a global conversation between users that paves the way to a far right European milieu thriving on Twitter. To conclude, we delve into the notions of radicalisation and political participation to emphasise the asymmetry between the two forms of media participation in respect to academic discourses and big tech and States’ practises.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Notwithstanding the discernable participation of women in terrorist groups, empirical research on women in terrorism is very scant in Bangladesh. To fill this gap, our article examines women’s involvement in terrorism by analyzing the life stories of dozens of Bangladeshi women terrorists. We use a terrorist lifecycle approach to understand the role of digital media in female participation, particularly in terms of when in the lifecycle digital media becomes important, and in terms of how digital media interacts with other factors to shape women’s involvement in terrorist organizations. After analyzing female profiles and their socio-demographic traits, we provide an in-depth analysis of three female terrorist lifecycles. An analysis of the profiles of Bangladeshi terrorists who use digital media reveals that women were more likely to use digital media than men in the recruitment phase. The in-depth case studies of three female terrorist profiles find that multiple and different factors impact their terrorist life cycles. Social networks – families and friends – typically play a role in individuals’ decision to become involved and further engagement in terrorism. Specifically, digital media allows women to expand their social interactions beyond what is possible in person, thus allowing for virtual pathways into terrorism.

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2023

Name: Dr. Saimum Parvez

Title: Digital Media and Narrowcasting: How Bangladeshi Violent Extremists Target Women and Youth for Recruitment

Outline: This presentation discusses the role of digital media in recruitment and how it helps recruits and recruiters discover each other. In Bangladesh, digital media have provided opportunities for violent extremists to reach previously unreachable demographics, such as women and youths from ‘westernized’ and well-off backgrounds. Saimum Parvez, Ph.D., is a MSCA-IMPACT cofund post-doctoral fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). This research project is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 101034352.