Online Library

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Adam Gadahn’s Abbottabad letter offers a rare opportunity to examine how this Al Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL) media operative and spokesman conceptualizes and executes media warfare. In this article, I first introduce, depict, and employ the author’s Terrorist Quadrangle Analysis (TQA) as a useful heuristic for conceptualizing and representing the four interrelated components of the AQSL terrorist enterprise: political objectives, media warfare, terrorist attacks, and strategic objectives. This TQA construct is then employed to conceptualize Gadahn’s media warfare acumen. Gadahn is shown to be an adept communications warfare operative who conscientiously disaggregates and evaluates key target audiences, messengers, messaging, and media. Gadahn’s vehement critique of select ‘‘jihadi’’ groups, in particular Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP), al-Shabaab, and the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), is then described. Key here is how and why Gadahn denounces their indiscriminate, murderous terrorist attacks on Muslim non-combatant civilians and other protected persons as effectively subverting his intended AQSL media warfare strategy and undermining AQSL strategic and religio-political objectives. A concluding section briefly summarizes these chief findings, offers select implications for scholarship and counter-AQSL messaging strategy, and identifies study limitations.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Scholars have long seen radicalisation as a predominantly group based phenomenon, occurring largely through ‘real world,’ in person interaction. By contrast, the internet is seen as playing only a limited ‘facilitating’ role in radicalising people to violence. However, a series of attacks by far right extremists over the past decade has demonstrated that this perspective is less accurate than it once was. Almost none of these terrorists were members of extremist groups and had only engaged with other extremists on the internet. In this article, we examine the relative importance of face-to-face group interaction and physically isolated internet-based radicalization in driving individuals towards extremist violence. We do so through a detailed case study of Action Zealandia, New Zealand’s leading ideological white nationalist group. The study is based on eighteen months of infiltration of the group by one of the authors from 2019 to 2021. When interacting online, members often adopt highly extremist personas, in some cases threatening mass violence. By contrast, face to face interaction and group membership pushed the group away from extremist violence. This was due to several factors: police pressure and a lack of opportunity for the movement to grow, and the often uninspiring nature of offline interaction.

In the context of the global jihadist mobilization triggered by the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2012 and the subsequent emergence of Islamic State, child and adolescent recruitment has reached unprecedented levels in Spain. Between 2013 and 2019, 44 jihadists were arrested in this country due to their involvement in the indoctrination and recruitment of individuals below 18 years of age. How did they carry out the mobilization of minors in support of global jihadism? Adopting a qualitative approach guided by grounded theory methods to address the question, this article relies on evidence collected mostly from primary sources (police reports, criminal proceedings, court hearings, as well as semi-structured interviews with police experts and front-line practitioners). The results indicate that their radicalization strategies varied as a function of the existence of previous personal ties between the recruiter and the minor; the age of the minor; and the environment in which the process unfolded. The interaction of these three factors generates the outline of three different formulas used in Spain for jihadist indoctrination of underage youth: one unfolds within the family milieu, another within the immediate social environment and a third via cyberspace.