Blog

by Robyn Torok While the average person was getting on with life in Paris before last Friday’s terror bombings and shootings, Twitter threads in Arabic from the Middle East were urging for attacks to be launched upon coalition forces in their home countries. “Advance, advance – forward, forward” they said, regarding Paris. Iraqi forces had ...

Authors Paul Gill, Emily Corner, Amy Thornton, and Maura Conway Abstract Using a unique dataset of 227 convicted UK-based terrorists, this report fills a large gap in the existing literature. Using descriptive statistics, we first outline the degree to which various online activities related to radicalisation were present within the sample. The results illustrate the ...

Welcome to Vol. 2, Iss. 4 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. VOX-Pol is happy to announce the publication of its first research report earlier this month, which measures online behaviours of convicted UK terrorists. We will release another report on 23 November examining the political, legal, and ethical constraints of policing the Internet for violent extremist content. If ...

by Elizabeth Pearson In the past two years, the so-called Islamic State (IS) has made Twitter its own, many of its supporters even describing the social media forum as an IS ‘wilayat’ or ‘province’. As academics and policy-makers alike become increasingly aware of the role of the online environment in radicalisation, the use of Twitter ...

by J.M Berger The world continues to deal with the offline consequences of how ISIS works online, hunting among the fringes of society for those rare individuals who can be convinced to act on its behalf. Its success comes in part from volume – social media makes it possible to sift efficiently through more potential ...

VOX-Pol was represented by our Coordinator, Dr. Maura Conway (DCU), at Club De Madrid’s global policy dialogue ‘Madrid +10: Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism‘, which took place in Madrid, Spain, from 27 – 28 October, 2015. VOX-Pol partner, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) at King’s College London, was co-convenor of ...

Launching 4 November 2015 at the VOX-Pol Lunch Briefing Series In London, on November 4 2015, Dr. Paul Gill will present findings from his co-authored research report entitled ‘What are the Roles of the Internet in Terrorism? Measuring Online Behaviours of Convicted UK Terrorists’, based upon recent VOX-Pol funded research. This report will be formally launched ...

by Helen Vatsikopoulos At the ongoing coronial inquest into the deaths arising from last year’s Lindt café siege in Sydney, experts cannot agree whether Man Haron Monis was a radicalised terrorist or a mentally unstable lone wolf who used radical Islam as a “crutch”. Throughout the inquest, prosecutors, solicitors and detectives are being grilled about ...

by Steven Luckert In 1924, Adolf Hitler described propaganda as “a terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.” For two decades, the Nazis showed the world what a devastating weapon it could be. They won over millions of Germans to their extremist goals in a democracy by branding their movement with powerful symbols and ...

This Autumn, the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence invites you to a series of Lunchtime Briefing Seminars, each exploring a different aspect of Violent Online Political Extremism. Sessions run each week, with themes covered including lone actor terrorists and online influences; IS, social media, and violent online Jihad; the Internet and the extreme right; female IS ...