Online Library

Elizabeth T. Harwood on networks of provocation.

This essay adopts a critical rhetorical perspective attuned to affect to investigate white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront, a popular white nationalist message board. My analysis illuminates how Stormfront attempts to appeal to mainstream white audiences by resisting normative expectations and affects articulated with white supremacy and (re)constructing white nationalism as a formation of white racial consciousness articulated with communal belonging, common sense, and pride. On Stormfront, affect is mobilized discursively to challenge colorblindness, construct rhetorical distance between white nationalism and white supremacy, and strategically negotiate white (dis)comfort with direct discourse on race to compel affective investments in white nationalism.

Over the past decade and a half, Western countries have spent vast sums of money on efforts aimed at combating terrorism, both at home and abroad. A significant percentage of these locally implemented counterterrorism initiatives have focused their efforts on combating what many governments now refer to as ‘radicalisation to violent extremism’. However, from its inception the concept of radicalisation to violent extremism, or ‘radicalisation’ as it is more commonly referred to, has been a source of ambiguity and confusion.
Rather than emerging from social science research, the term ‘radicalisation’ first appeared in a May 2004 EU document listing possible root causes conducive to the recruitment of individuals by foreign extremists. An expert group established by the European Commission shortly thereafter, noted that the notion was inherently problematic, and cautioned against the use of the term due to its ambiguity (Coolsaet, 2015, p. 5). However, attacks in Madrid and London thrust the concepts of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘counter radicalisation’ to the centre stage of European counterterrorism policy. The prominence of these UK and European efforts has subsequently seen the concept migrate and rise to prominence in other Western countries including Canada, Australia and eventually the USA.

To this day radicalisation remains a contested and misunderstood term, largely because the concept emphasises the individual (and to some extent the ideology) and ‘significantly de-emphasises the wider circumstances and the context in which it arises’ (Sedgwick, 2012, p. 480).

Given the difficulties in designing a solution for a problem which is ill defined, it is hardly surprising that the ambiguity associated with radicalisation has extended to the policy response, today largely referred to as countering violent extremism (CVE).
CVE has coevolved with the debate about radicalisation as a subfield of counterterrorism policy and practice (Holmer, 2013, p. 2). The term (CVE) likely emerged from a policy department which, after determining that concepts such as terrorism and radicalisation were too poorly defined and stigmatised to use, resolved to introduce into the discourse the best new poorly defined term a focus group could generate. The lack of a clear definition of CVE has unsurprisingly resulted in the concept evolving ‘into a catch-all category that lacks precision and focus’ (Heydemann, 2014) and seen many programmes conducted under the CVE banner unable to define the specifics of what they ‘are preventing, let alone knowing how or whether … [they] have prevented it’ (Horgan, 2014).

Although the resources allocated to CVE are modest compared to those dedicated to more traditional counterterrorism efforts, CVE represents the most significant development in counterterrorism in Western countries seen in the last 10 years (Romaniuk, 2015). However, many governments have thus far struggled to generate effective and practical projects (Ramalingam & Tuck, 2014) and one of the world’s leading terrorism experts has noted that ‘we have a rapidly diminishing opportunity to figure out what CVE can be’ (Horgan, 2014). The following special issue seeks to assist policy-makers and practitioners to understand what CVE is, and to design effective CVE policies and projects.

This special edition of Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression draws together research conducted by some of the world’s leading thinkers on the topic of CVE. All contributors hold extensive experience working closely with CVE policy-makers and practitioners, and the findings contained within the following publications highlight the potential for action-research to assist in the CVE work performed by governments. The first article presents a framework to help understand the concept of CVE, and a system to categorise the breadth of CVE programmes, while the second paper proposes a model which can be utilised to build a balanced and effective CVE strategy. The third examines findings from two studies looking at the difficulties associated with reaching those most in need of assistance, while the final paper analyses a specific CVE effort in detail and measures the impact the project has had on the ground. Below is an overview of the four papers which make up this edition.

Today’s youth have almost universal access to the internet and frequently engage in social networking activities using various social media platforms and devices. This is a phenomenon that hate groups are exploiting when disseminating their propaganda. This study seeks to better understand youth exposure to hateful material in the online space by exploring predictors of such exposure including demographic characteristics (age, gender and race), academic performance, online behaviours, online disinhibition, risk perception, and parents/guardians’ supervision of online activities. We implemented a cross-sectional study design, using a paper questionnaire, in two high schools in Massachusetts (USA), focusing on students 14 to 19 years old. Logistic regression models were used to study the association between independent variables (demographics, online behaviours, risk perception, parental supervision) and exposure to hate online. Results revealed an association between exposure to hate messages in the online space and time spent online, academic performance, communicating with a stranger on social media, and benign online disinhibition. In our sample, benign online disinhibition was also associated with students’ risk of encountering someone online that tried to convince them of racist views. This study represents an important first step in understanding youth’s risk factors of exposure to hateful material online.

This study is focused on three topics regarding Geneva Convention III. First, is the process of classifying conflicts either as a Common Article 2 or Common Article 3 armed conflict at the onset of hostilities. Conflict classification is critical to the implementation of the Geneva Conventions in warfare and carries with it vast implications dependent upon that decision. The criterion for this classification is presented and, by using the United States as a case study, evaluated to determine whether this aspect of the conventions remains not only applicable but adequate to states who are a party to the treaty. Determinations of the United States and the legal support backing these decisions are thus investigated.

On 24th July 2013, feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez’s petition to the Bank of England to have Elizabeth Fry’s image on the UK’s £5 note replaced with the image of another woman was successful. The petition challenged the Bank of England’s original plan to replace Fry with Winston Churchill, which would have meant that no woman aside from the Queen would be represented on any UK banknote. Following this, Criado-Perez was subjected to ongoing misogynistic abuse on Twitter, a microblogging social network, including threats of rape and death. This paper investigates this increasingly prominent phenomenon of rape threats made via social networks. Specifically, we investigate the sustained period of abuse directed towards the Twitter account of feminist campaigner and journalist, Caroline Criado-Perez. We then turn our attention to the formation of online discourse communities as they respond to and participate in forms of extreme online misogyny on Twitter. We take a corpus of 76,275 tweets collected during a three month period in which the events occurred (July to September 2013), which comprises 912,901 words. We then employ an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of language in the context of this social network. Our approach combines quantitative approaches from the fields of corpus linguistics to detect emerging discourse communities, and then qualitative approaches from discourse analysis to analyse how these communities construct their identities.