Blog

By Joel Wing More than half of Mosul has fallen to Iraqi government forces and it is only a matter of time before the whole city is retaken. How is the Islamic State portraying this defeat? Has it changed its messaging since the start of the battle? Charlie Winter, a Senior Research Fellow at the ...

12-month fixed-term contract The VOX-Pol Research Fellowship Programme recruits promising researchers in the area of Violent Online Political Extremism, trains them in related research and analysis, and mentors them in delivering excellent completed projects. We are seeking innovative research proposals in the area of Violent Online Political Extremism. In particular, we encourage applications focusing on, ...

By Yannick Veilleux-Lepage The recent car-and-knife attack in London was just the latest in a string of high-profile incidents where assailants have used vehicles as deadly weapons. This type of attack has over the past few years become a feature of violent terrorism in the West and elsewhere – so where did it come from, and ...

This post is Part 3 of 3; Part I is HERE and Part II HERE. Also, a PDF combining all three posts is available HERE  Collectively, the results from the open source data analysis presented in Part I and the findings from the police data contained in Post II highlight the need to focus upon ...

 Update 05/04/2017 Yesterday, 4 April 2017, the Hungarian parliament passed the amendment to the Higher Education law that makes the operation of Central European University impossible or in permanent threat in Hungary. With all members of the ruling Fidesz party of Viktor Orban voting a mandatory “yes”, the law passed with 123 votes for and 38 votes ...

On 29 – 31 March VOX-Pol’s and CEU’s Kate Coyer will be participating in RightsCon Brussels 2017. On Thursday 30 March Dr. Coyer will participate in the GFMD meeting on Universal Do-No-Harm Principles and Best Practices for PVE/CVE and Counter- Propaganda. This meeting will be moderated by Principal Adviser to the OSCE Representative on Freedom ...

This post is Part 2 of 3; Part I is HERE. Background Last week’s post—part I of three in this series—presented findings on convicted UK terrorists’ online behaviours from a large scale analysis based on open source data. Follow-up research on the antecedent behaviours, including online activities, of UK-based lone-actor terrorists leading up to their ...

On 24 March VOX-Pol’s and OII’s Research Fellow Caterina Froio participated to the EHESS seminar on ‘Media and social movements’ in Paris.  (https://enseignements-2016.ehess.fr/2016/ue/1939/ )   On Friday 24 March Dr. Froio participated in the seminar on “Medias and Social Movements: sociology of publics and counter-publics”. The seminar was organized and moderated by Dr. Konstantinos Eleftheriadis ...

This post is Part 1 of 3. Background Previous research on terrorist use of the Internet generally discusses the opportunities offered by the Internet to terrorist groups. Such accounts implicitly view the interaction between the Internet and the user as uni-directional (i.e. exposure to Internet content may cause behaviour change). This lacks an acknowledgement that not ...

By Joe Whittaker There seems to be near-ubiquity between discussion of radicalisation to violent extremism and the Internet. Despite this, the study of online radicalisation remains under-researched and as a result ill-understood. This is, perhaps, surprising given the vast attention in the media that is given to the online presence of groups such as Islamic ...