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The Western Balkans faces a double challenge from online extremism. Online platforms are facilitating the specific targeting of the region by diverse international extremist narratives. Meanwhile regional histories and geopolitics are being appropriated to justify extremist actions and narratives around the world. This is part of a wider trend that underscores the growing challenge posed by the proliferation of transnational extremist ideologies on online platforms, both violent jihadist and extreme right wing. In the Western Balkans, this poses a number of specific risks. While the issue of the prevention, mitigation, and regulation of online extremism is a global one, there are a number of region-specific considerations relevant to effective policy and practitioner responses.

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.

This book explores how ordinary Arab-speaking social media users have reacted to propaganda from the Islamic State, rather than how IS propaganda has targeted ordinary users, thus providing a change in perspective in the literature. The authors provide a comprehensive account of the evolution of the Arabic discourse on IS, encompassing all phases of the Caliphate’s political evolution, from the apogee of the Islamic State in October 2014 to the loss of its unofficial capital of Raqqa in September 2017. Taking into account key events, the book also considers the most recurrent topics for IS and its opponents who engage in the Twitter conversation. The analysis is based on around 29 million tweets written in the Arabic language, representing a random sample of around one-third of all Arabic tweets referring to IS over the 2014-2017 timeframe.

Gaming adjacent platforms have created an expanding ecosystem of online gaming, esport, and social media actors sharing online space, content, communication tools, and users. Esport, in particular, has grown beyond all expectations and is now a global leader in sport fandom and spectatorship. At the same time, the online infiltration and influence of far-right extremism have resulted in increased challenges of online radicalization. Gaming and esport form a foundational part of youth digital culture today, and this has provided a fertile ground for far-right extremist groups to communicate and connect with users globally. This paper uses framing theory and qualitative document analysis to examine how media articles frame the relationship between far-right extremism and esport. The findings enhance our understanding of how narratives of far-right extremist influence in esport and gaming are framed in the media and how this coverage shapes contemporary societal discussion. This is important because as far-right extremism continues to be propagated and performed in esport and gaming spaces, how this is framed to public audiences can have a critical influence on esport and gamer identities, victimization or criminalization of online spaces, and future activities or approaches to counter radicalization within the online environment.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2023

Name: Jonathan Collins

Title: An Introduction to Netnography & Step-by-step Guide

Outline: “New immersive methodologies are needed to better understand online extremist communities. The presentation will cover one of these (Netnography), providing an essential glimpse into this multifunctional tool and the benefits it offers to the field. The lecture will also include a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a netnographic study, offering a great starting point for those looking to adopt the technique.”