Blog

By Reem Ahmed and Daniela Pisoiu In a globalized world, events thousands of miles away have far-reaching effects, mostly through their spectacularism. Oftentimes, these events feel even closer to home when there are ideas and people who might have in one way or another contributed to the facilitation of such atrocities. Right-wing extremism has long ...

By Aaron Mackey One of the most important principles underpinning the Internet is that if you say something illegal, you should be held responsible for it—not the owners of the site or service where you said it. That principle has seen many theats this year—not just in federal legislation, but also in a string of ...

VOX-Pol had considerable involvement in this week’s Europol conference on ‘Terrorism Evolving: Insights from Research.’ The two-day conference took place on Tuesday and Wednesday at Europol’s headquarter in The Hague, The Netherlands. This third annual conference of the European Counter Terrorism Centre Advisory Network on terrorism and propaganda featured, presentations by speakers, largely academic researchers, ...

By Luke Munn “From where did you receive/research/develop your beliefs? The Internet, of course.” ~ Brenton Tarrant On Friday, March 15th 2019, at 1:40pm, Brenton Tarrant walked into the first of two mosques in central Christchurch and began shooting indiscriminately, leading to the deaths of 50 people. Already there has been speculation about what drove ...

VOX-Pol researchers took part in the International Studies Association’s (ISA) 60th Annual Convention, which took place from 27 – 30 March, 2019 in Toronto, Canada. ISA has over 6,500 members worldwide and is the most respected and widely known scholarly association in the international relations and security field. The forward-looking theme for ISA’s 60th convention ...

VOX-Pol’s Coordinator, Prof. Maura Conway (Dublin City University) was in Ottawa, Canada from 24 – 27 March, 2019, for a week-long event series, organised by Public Safety Canada’s Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence, to further Canada’s National Strategy on Countering Radicalization to Violence. The Canada Centre’s 2019 Event Series brought together ...

By Nancy Jamal In the aftermath of the Christchurch attack, attention has been drawn to the role of mass media in the aftermath of such attacks, including by the UK’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer, Neil Basu. Last week’s Blog post also addressed responsible reporting, as does Virginie Andre’s report Understanding the Impact of Terrorist Event Reporting on Countering ...

On 20 March 2019, VOX-Pol and the Security Distillery hosted a symposium in Dublin City University titled ‘Extremism: Online Networks and Offline Violence’. The Security Distillery is an initiative from young researchers for (young) researchers, with the aim of turning complex issues into simple matters in order to provide quality, accessible information for students and ...

By Dr Matteo Vergani The Christchurch terror attack conducted by Brenton Tarrant highlights the urgent need to break the destructive synergy between media reporting and terrorist messaging. Tarrant planned a careful media strategy. He exploited social media, like many al-Qaeda and ISIS-inspired terrorists before him, live-streaming his attack and uploading a manifesto in the expectation that ...

By Adam G. Klein When a U.S. senator asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Can you define hate speech?” it was arguably the most important question that social networks face: how to identify extremism inside their communities. Hate crimes in the 21st century follow a familiar pattern in which an online tirade escalates into violent actions. ...