Blog

By Jade Hutchinson The ‘Right’ Kind of Dogma Radical-right groups harness online platforms to disseminate dogmas against the ‘Other’. In response to an influx of foreign migrants, the concatenation of Islamist terrorism and record levels of distrust in government institutions, the radical-right is invigorated by an aggressive anti-‘Other’ sentiment. As the source of social anxiety and ...

On Thursday, 27 September, 2018 the Kozmetsky Center at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas featured VOX-Pol Coordinator, Prof. Maura Conway, for their first event of the 2018-2019 academic year. Prof. Conway’s presentation entitled “Understanding Exploitation of the Internet and Social Media in Promoting Violent Extremism and Terrorism”  drew an interested audience of students and faculty. Prof. Conway’s visit to Austin also included a ...

By Sam Jackson For years, researchers studying online political extremism have used computational tools to collect large amounts of data from social media, most often from Twitter. Two main logics guide these data collections: they can be built around users (e.g., collecting all tweets sent by given accounts) or they can be built around vocabulary (e.g., ...

Violent Extremism, Terrorism, and the Internet: Present and Future Trends University of Amsterdam, 20 – 21 August Session One: Extremist Dualities: Online vs Offline, Homogeneity vs Heterogeneity Boots on the ground? Online and Offline Identities of the Extreme Right Bradley Galloway (University of the Fraser Valley and AVE Network), Ryan Scrivens (Concordia University and VOX-Pol), ...

Read in German Read in French Read in Spanish By Peter King When the so-called Islamic State ramped up its media operation in the summer of 2014 to promote its territorial advances across Iraq and Syria, terrorism researchers who had been in the business for a decade or more were forced to take a step ...

VOX-Pol has released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled Horizons Of Hate: A Comparative Approach to Social Media Hate Speech, authored by Matti Pohjonen, on 11 September 2018. About the Report In the report, Pohjonen employs a comparative approach to social media hate speech. The study compares a Finnish anti-refugee and anti-immigration Facebook ...

By Mike Edwards My belief in the value of collaboration between police and academics stems from a policing conference on domestic violence, stalking and sexual violence that I attended as a young police officer. Criminal behavioural analyst Laura Richards delivered the keynote speech. This sparked a personal interest in human behavioural analysis and specialist criminal ...

By Carol Winkler One of the attendees at the recent Ethics of Terrorism Research workshop held at Swansea University poignantly observed, “ethics is method, method is ethics.” This rich concept has various implications for how terrorism researchers should think about their work. To start such a conversation, I will revisit Simon Cottee and Jack Cunliffe’s ...

Welcome to Vol. 5 Iss. 3 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of our newsletter, or any events or research carried out by VOX-Pol, please forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe via our website. In particular, please update any interested colleagues about ...

We are delighted to have Mina al-Lami as the keynote speaker at our upcoming conference in August. Mina al-Lami heads the long-established team of online jihadism experts at BBC Monitoring (BBCM). She is the editor of BBCM’s Jihadism page that features daily reports and insight on jihadist developments, trends, profiles and online platforms. Her team relies on meticulous ...