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This year’s Counterterrorism Yearbook draws upon 19 contributing authors, each a renowned thought leader in their field, to promote practical counterterrorism solutions by reviewing a global range of terrorism developments and counterterrorism responses. ASIO’s Director General, Mike Burgess commends the publication for its ‘valuable contribution to the public discourse on counterterrorism’. While maintaining its geographic focus, the Yearbook now includes thematic chapters on mental health, strategic policing, the media, the terror–crime nexus and terrorist innovation. These new thematic chapters have been included to encourage governments to consider more proactive CT agendas that move beyond the current focus on disrupting plots and discouraging people from joining and supporting terrorist groups. The focus here has been on promoting new thinking on how to deal with emergent areas of concern, such as comorbidity of mental health, use of gaming platforms, and artificial intelligence.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Mainstream risk assessment frameworks such as TRAP-18, ERG22+, VERA-2R, and RADAR largely use Structured Professional Judgement to map individuals against four critical factors; ideology, affiliation, grievance, and moral emotions. However, the growing use of online communication platforms by extremists presents a series of opportunities to complement or extend existing risk assessment frameworks. Here, we examine linguistic markers of morality and emotion in ideologically diverse online discussion groups and discuss their relevance to extant risk assessment frameworks. Specifically, we draw on social media data from the Reddit platform collected across a range of community topics. Nine hundred and eighty-eight threads containing 272,298 individual comments were processed before constructing high-order models of moral emotions. Emotional and moral linguistic content was then derived from these comments. We then conducted comparisons of linguistic content between mainstream left and right political discourse, anti-Muslim (far-right), Men’s Rights (Incel-like), and a nonviolent apolitical control group. Results show that a combination of individualising moral communication and high emotionality separate far-right and Incel-like groups from mainstream political discourse and provide an early warning opportunity.

This report presents findings from a quantitative study, which aimed to explore the role of the Internet in radicalisation and offending of 235 convicted extremists in England and Wales.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.