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This book examines two key themes in terrorism studies, the radicalisation process and counter-terrorism policies, through the lens of social networks.
It aims to show that networks should be at the forefront not only when analysing terrorists, but also when assessing the responses to their actions. The volume makes a unique contribution by addressing two relatively new themes for terrorism studies. First it puts social relations and cooperation issues at the forefront – an approach often identified as crucial to future breakthroughs in the field. Second, many contributions tackle the role of the Internet in the process of radicalisation and in recruitment more generally, a highly debated topic in the field today. In addition, the book provides a valuable mix of review essays, critical essays, and original empirical studies. This balanced approach is also found in the topics covered by the authors, as well as their academic disciplines, which include sociology, computer science, geography, history, engineering, and criminology as well as political science. Many of the true advances in terrorism studies depend on the successful collaboration of multi-disciplinary teams, each with a different set of methodological and conceptual tools. This volume reflects the new-found diversity in this field and is a true product of its time.

This monograph by RAND surveys social-science literature relating to counterterrorism. It also takes steps toward integrating the knowledge reflected in that literature and suggesting theories and methods to inform analysis and modeling.

The prevalence of dangerous misinformation and extreme views online has intensified since the onset of Israel-Hamas war on 7 October 2023. Social media platforms have long grappled with the challenge of providing effective mitigation schemes that can scale to the 5 billion-strong online population. Here, we introduce a novel solution grounded in online network engineering and demonstrate its potential through small pilot studies. We begin by outlining the characteristics of the online social network infrastructure that have rendered previous approaches to mitigating extremes ineffective. We then present our new online engineering scheme and explain how it circumvents these issues. The efficacy of this scheme is demonstrated through a pilot empirical study, which reveals that automatically assembling groups of users online with diverse opinions, guided by a map of the online social media infrastructure, and facilitating their anonymous interactions, can lead to a softening of extreme views. We then employ computer simulations to explore the potential for implementing this scheme online at scale and in an automated manner, without necessitating the contentious removal of specific communities, imposing censorship, relying on preventative messaging, or requiring consensus within the online groups. These pilot studies provide preliminary insights into the effectiveness and feasibility of this approach in online social media settings.

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