Online Library

This article maps mechanisms by which online social media activities may contribute to right-wing political violence. High-impact studies on the wave of right-wing and racist violence in the 1990s and early 2000s established that mass media discourse on immigrants and previous violent incidents had a significant influence on the prevalence of radical right violence. This link was captured by Koopmans’s and Olzak’s notion of discursive opportunities. However, this was before the dominance of online social networks and social media, which changed the media landscape radically. We argue for broadening and refining the operationalization of the concept of discursive opportunities in social movement studies as well as including in our theoretical models new mechanisms brought about by the new online media. In relation to radical right and anti-immigrant mobilizations in Sweden in the 2010s, we elaborate and exemplify three mechanisms through which activities on social media may affect the incidence of violence: a) having an increasingly co-produced discursive opportunity structure, b) making inter-group dynamics in movement groups and networks trans-local, and c) sharing (rare) practical information and co-ordinating activities.

The Islamic State (ISIS) early became infamous for its broadcasts of extreme violence. However, within months, the group’s initially dominant images of combat and executions had been subsumed into a broader propaganda platform more focused on state-building and community engagement. Drawing on a close reading of Abu Bakr Naji’s Management of Savagery, this article conceptualises three dominant themes within ISIS’ recruitment propaganda—violence, state and caliphate—and analyses their development and presentation over time. Employing a recruitment model adapted from Prochaska and DiClemente’s theory of behavioural change, it finds that ISIS developed a multidimensional propaganda platform, undergoing both broad thematic and structural evolution, which democratised the appeal of its jihad to cohorts who would otherwise be uninspired by extremist violence. ‘Technological coding’—the selective publication of thematic content by broadcast format—is proposed as a means by which ISIS was able to sustain binary violent and non-violent identities, and its function in the group’s propaganda machine is explored in depth. In the wake of ISIS’ territorial defeat, understanding the logic and effectiveness of its recruitment methodology is essential in preventing its resurgence or the rise of a newer organisation seeking to take its place.

Despite the visible presence of violent extremist groups, and evidence of their connection with transnational groups such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, the number of empirical studies on this topic is limited in Bangladesh. There have been over 50 violent extremist attacks in Bangladesh in recent years (2013-2017) and digital media was used in different ways in most of these attacks. There appear to be no scholarly articles addressing this phenomenon in Bangladesh. To fill this gap, this project sheds light on the subject by analyzing life stories of Bangladeshi violent extremists. The data for this project was collected from content analysis of newspaper reports, Jihadi online magazines, and videos. Besides presenting current trends on how extremists are using digital media, this paper identifies challenges for counter-terrorism efforts in Bangladesh and provides suggestions to mitigate these challenges.

Whereas modern communication strategies have been celebrated for promoting ease of interaction, this chapter highlights that they have been deployed by some terrorist groups in Africa to threaten human security. It defines religious extremism in terms of the expression of extreme or violent actions or jihad on the basis of particular interpretations or understanding of religious teaching or scripture, especially the Quran. The chapter examines the (online) communication behaviours of extremists/terrorist groups in West Africa and Somalia that are often associated with Islam. It also examines religious extremism and its relation to violent conflict and describes the extremist violent activities of some identified African terrorist groups, and how contemporary media and the Internet have provided dynamic platforms for disseminating their message and ideology. Liebman views religious extremism as the desire to expand the scope, details and strictness of religious law, social isolation and the rejection of the surrounding culture.

This paper investigates the link between social media and hate crime. We show that antirefugee sentiment on Facebook predicts crimes against refugees in otherwise similar municipalities with higher social media usage. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation in the timing of major Facebook and internet outages. Consistent with a role for “echo chambers,” we find that right-wing social media posts contain narrower and more loaded content than news reports. Our results suggest that social media can act as a propagation mechanism for violent crimes by enabling the spread of extreme viewpoints.

In the recent past, the numbers of religiously- and politically-motivated terrorist attacks have increased, inevitably raising the question of effective measures to prevent further terrorist attacks. Empirical studies related to school shootings have shown that school shooters reliably (directly and indirectly) disclosed their intentions or plans prior to the attack, a phenomenon termed leaking or leakage. Leaking has been used for preventive purposes in this area of research. Recent research has indicated that leaking was also present prior to politically and religiously motivated terrorist attacks. In order to determine the current state of knowledge about leaking related to these offenses, we conducted a review of the international literature on religiously and politically motivated terrorist attacks. Up to 90% of the offenders showed some type of leaking prior to the attacks. A range of different forms of leaking could be observed. Leaking often occurred in the form of verbal communication with family and friends and/or via communication over the Internet. Terrorist offenders apparently tend to show leaking more often than other groups of mass murderers. Findings regarding similarities and dissimilarities in leaking between religiously motivated, jihadist and politically-motivated, far-right terrorist attacks were contradictory. We discuss the implications of these findings for practice and research as well as the strengths and possible weaknesses of the leaking concept.