far-right

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 Eviane Leidig A lacuna exists in the study of the radical right whereby researchers focus disproportionately on developments in Europe and North America. Yet, countries such as India, the Philippines, Turkey, and Brazil highlight how the radical right can operate, and indeed flourish, beyond the West. Our failure to incorporate these non-Western case studies poses ...

By Niamn Kirk, Eugenia Siapera, Gavan Titley Since ‘news tickers’ first began to crawl along the bottom of our television screens, ‘breaking news’ has become a key element in how audiences receive the news, and think about what counts as news. In a context where news stories now unfold rapidly across multiple media platforms, and an ...

By Tiana Gaudette, Garth Davies, and Ryan Scrivens This blog is Part II of II. Click here for Part I. This blog is the second of a two-part series that was presented at the ‘VOX-Pol Conference – Violent Extremism, Terrorism, and the Internet: Present and Future Trends’ in Amsterdam on 20 August 2018. Last week on ...

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 ...

By William Allchorn The 9th of June saw one of the most prominent far-right mobilisations of the year. Assembling in Trafalgar Square, hundreds of demonstrators turned out to protest the arrest and imprisonment of former English Defence League (EDL) leader, Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley Lennon), for contempt of court after he broadcast live ...

By Alexander Ritzmann The Propaganda Process Is online propaganda really effective? How can it be countered? And what can practitioners of Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) and policymakers learn from the research findings of other relevant disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology and neuroscience? Propaganda, understood here as the strategic communication of ideas aiming at manipulating specific target ...

By Andre Oboler Online bullying, hate and incitement are on the rise, and new approaches are needed to tackle them. As the Australian Senate conducts hearings for its Inquiry into cyberbullying, it should consider a two-pronged approach to combating the problem. First, the government should follow the lead of Germany in imposing financial penalties on major ...

By Tiana Gaudette, Ryan Scrivens, and Garth Davies Since the advent of the Internet, far-right extremists – amongst other extremist movements – from across the globe have exploited online resources to build a transnational ‘virtual community’. The Internet is a fundamental medium that facilitates these radical communities, not only in ‘traditional’ hate sites such as Stormfront, ...