Radicalisation

By Linda Schlegel The ‘gamification of terror’ has received increased attention in the last years, especially in the aftermath of the right-wing extremist attacks in Christchurch, El Paso and Halle, which were livestreamed by the perpetrators akin to ‘Let’s Play’ streams found in the gaming scene. Previously, ISIS had made headlines, because it used not ...

By Anne Speckhard “If I was going to die at least I could die helping children. [It’s] illogical that you are entering a war zone that you don’t know anything about … I felt if I did something good it would overwrite the bad that had happened.” — Canadian 46-year-old Kimberly Pullman, speaking about her decision ...

By Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández and Joanne Gray People watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Over the past few years, the video sharing platform has come under fire for its role in spreading and amplifyingextreme views. YouTube’s video recommendation system, in particular, has been criticised for radicalising young people and steering viewers ...

By Pamela Ligouri Bunker and Robert J. Bunker The 2019 Terrorism and Social Media (TASM) Conference took place on 25 and 26 June 2019 at Swansea University Bay Campus, Wales, United Kingdom. The conference was organised by Swansea University’s Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law and its Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC), with the support ...

By Mike Caulfield Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless ...

By Linda Schlegel & Till Baaken In recent years, radicalisation, its causes and facilitating conditions as well as possible counter-strategies have been widely discussed within the academic community, among practitioners, and by politicians. Today, there are a variety of radicalisation models available in order to facilitate our understanding of this phenomenon and the empirical evidence is progressively ...

Our latest report is launched today, May 03, 2017, available now in the VOX-Pol Online Library VOX-Pol has released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled ‘Research Perspectives on Online Radicalisation: A Literature Review, 2006—2016’. Other reports in the series have included: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the ...

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 ...

This Blog post is a product of the ESRC-funded Youth Extremisms Research Seminar Series. By Prof. Hilary Pilkington Following significant electoral successes for populist radical right parties and several instances of extraordinary extremist violence, perpetrated by both jihadist and extreme right actors, the attention of scholars, journalists and politicians has understandably focussed upon extremist and radical growth ...

By Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan White nationalism, which advocates against multiculturalism in favour of an ethnic and cultural state linked to a mythologised European identity, has become an increasingly high profile movement over the past five years. Anders Breivik in Norway, Dylan Roof in America, and (to a lesser degree) Thomas Mair in the United Kingdom all had ...