Blog

VOX-Pol Programme Manager and Research Fellow, Lisa McInerney, participated in CYBERSEC, the European Cybersecurity Forum which was held from 28-29 September in Krakow, Poland. In one of the military breakout sessions on ‘Cyberthreats: New Dimensions of Conflicts in Europe, Lisa’s contribution focused upon ‘Islamic State’ online capabilities and operations. ...

VOX-Pol Research Fellow Dr. Nico Prucha is quoted extensively in a piece entitled ‘Fighting ISIS Online’ published yesterday (30 Sept. 2015) by MIT Technology Review. The article’s author, David Talbot, describes how the Islamic State (IS) has mastered the use of online propaganda and recruitment via the internet. Dr. Prucha explains in the piece how ...

by Massimo Leone On the one hand, terrorism is the antithesis of communication. It does not aim at transmitting any message to its victims, but at annihilating them. On the other hand, yet, terrorism is extremely powerful communication for those who witness the tragedy, directly or through the media, and are either terrified or fascinated ...

VOX-Pol’s Dr. Maura Conway delivered a keynote address at last week’s FOSINT Conference (26 – 27 August 2015), which was co-located with ASONAM 2015 at Telecom-ParisTech in Paris, France. FOSINT, which stands for ‘International Symposium on Foundations of Open Source Intelligence and Security Informatics,’ is focused on web intelligence and security, crime data mining, cybercrime analysis, open source situational ...

VOX-Pol Research Fellow Dr. Nico Prucha presented a talk on “Online Media and Online Extremism: The Case of Sunni Extremists and Media Strategies” for a workshop entitled “Violent Extremism in the Western Balkans” that took place in Belgrade, Serbia from 27 – 29 September. The event was organized by the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Consortium ...

by Andrea Cerase, Elena D’Angelo and Claudia Santoro The rise of racism in Europe In recent years online racism has seen a quick and serious growth in many European and non-European countries, till to become a worrying global phenomenon.(1) One of the most striking examples of such process is the rise of White Supremacist Movements online. Their strategy ...

by Alex Krasodomski-Jones A decade after 7/7, the War on Terror rumbles on. Ten years ago, it was Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein: a battle against dictators and super-terrorists responsible for thousands of deaths in the West and at home. Today it is IS, though the shaky narrative of good versus evil is looking ever-more ...

by Benjamin Ducol Beyond a dichotomic view of radicalisation in the digital era The dichotomisation of “virtual” versus “real world” is one of the major pitfalls in current studies of radicalisation in the digital era. In many cases, scholars tend to conceptualise virtual spaces as autonomous from what actually happens in the “real world” and ...

by Wasim Ahmed I have a social media research blog where I find and write about tools that can be used to capture and analyse data from social media platforms. My PhD looks at Twitter data for health, such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I am increasingly asked why I am looking at Twitter, ...

Welcome to Vol. 2, Iss. 3 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. The VOX-Pol Network of Excellence is a European Union Framework Programme 7 funded academic research network focused on researching the prevalence, contours, functions, and impacts of Violent Online Political Extremism and responses to it. It is a five-year programme which commenced on 1 January, 2014. We ...