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VOX-Pol Blog post.

The present report is the second in a series of reports to be issued pursuant to
Security Council resolution 2178 (2014), which requires the Counter-Terrorism
Committee Executive Directorate to assess Member States’ capacity to stem the flow
of foreign terrorist fighters, identify good practices in that regard and facilitate the
delivery of related technical assistance to States in need. The first report adopted a
thematic approach to the foreign terrorist fighter threat, focusing on the
implementation efforts of 21 Member States. The second report adopts a regional
approach and analyses the efforts of 32 States in Central Asia, the Maghreb, East
Africa/Horn of Africa, Western Europe and Oceania/Americas.

The Brexit referendum to leave the EU and Trump’s success in the US general election in 2016 sparked new waves of discussion on nativism, nationalism, and the far right. Within these analyses, however, very little attention has been devoted towards exploring the transnational ideological circulation of Islamophobia and anti-establishment sentiment, especially amongst diaspora and migrant networks. This article thus explores the role of the Indian diaspora as mediators in populist radical right discourse in the West. During the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election and presidency, a number of Indian diaspora voices took to Twitter to express pro-Brexit and pro-Trump views. This article presents a year-long qualitative study of these users. It highlights how these diasporic Indians interact and engage on Twitter in order to signal belonging on multiple levels: as individuals, as an imaginary collective non-Muslim diaspora, and as members of (populist radical right) Twitter society. By analysing these users’ social media performativity, we obtain insight into how social media spaces may help construct ethnic and (trans)national identities according to boundaries of inclusion/exclusion. This article demonstrates how some Indian diaspora individuals are embedded into exclusivist national political agendas of the populist radical right in Western societies.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) concerns itself with the issue of its citizens becoming radicalized and joining extremist groups. Daesh is one such group that is able to attract people from varying backgrounds to commit violent acts of terror. Moreover, Daesh encourages those in the West to migrate to their controlled territory to participate in the ongoing conflict in Syria and Iraq. The group relies on women to participate in this migration so that they can marry jihadis and raise the next generation of supporters. This paper examines how Daesh radicalizes these women, specifically second-generation Muslim women in the UK. Daesh uses social media to radicalize recruits and this holds true in their strategy for incorporating women into their self-declared caliphate. Once women have migrated to Daesh-controlled territory, they themselves act as radicalization agents via social media. This paper uses Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as a way of formulating how Daesh constructs its own community through pseudo-nationalism that is able to radicalize young people in the West who are part of a diasporic group and do not have particularly strong ties to their ancestral culture and religion. To facilitate the radicalization of secondgeneration Muslim women in the UK, Daesh uses social media to establish a particular image of the caliphate through this pseudo-nationalism. This paper uses a case study of Amira Abase, Shamima Begum, and Kadiza Sultana, or the ‘Bethnal Green Girls’, to explore the radicalization of SGMW via social media.

Images of death and dying in the media around the globe have a symbiotic relationship with nation states as they can bolster state control by defining who has the right to take lives in the interests of the community, by identifying enemies of the state, by demonstrating dominance over enemies, and by lending a moral posture to the state’s war efforts. Previously, the growing corpus of research on media’s display of death and about to die images has focused almost exclusively on media outlets that bolster established states on the global stage. By analyzing 1965 death and about to die images displayed in Dabiq, ISIS’s English-language magazine, and al-Naba’, the same group’s Arabic-language newspaper, this study adds an understanding of the messaging strategies deployed by groups striving to challenge, rather than reinforce, existing national boundaries. The findings suggest that while ISIS adopts some standard media practices, it also utilizes unique and audience targeted approaches regarding the frequency of image use, the identify of the corpses, the display of dead bodies, and the presentation of those responsible for the pictured dead bodies in its media campaign.

Policymakers, researchers, and responders alike focus on the evolution of terrorist and other groups associated with political violence. This study offers a comparative analysis of the images of ISIS and U.S. far-right groups’ use of flag images, as such emblems contribute to community building, heighten emotional responses, and have political import. It adds to previous work by comparing groups across the ideological spectrum, by recognizing differences in media operations present as groups evolve, and by focusing on visual messaging that is vital for influence in the online environment. Using chi-square analyses, it compares almost 5000 images that include flags from ISIS publications between 2014 and 2020 with 600 images focused on the far-right events at the Unite the Right Rally and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Specifically, it looks at the compositional elements of the flags appearing in the images, the immediate media context within the photographic frame, and the broader regulatory, political, religious, and economic situational contexts. The findings indicate that while the far right and ISIS both heavily rely on flags in their visual images, eight key differences emerge as related to the groups, their contexts, and the evolution of the media systems.