Radicalisation

By Tobias Gemmerli This article was originally published by the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) on 10 November 2016. Our democratic culture can act as a safeguard against radicalisation, if we make space in the public debate for counter-cultural movements and radical political projects. In the confrontation with radicalism and political violence, democratic freedoms are often named the ...

On 8 December, VOX-Pol’s Programme Manager, Lisa McInerney, presented a selection of VOX-Pol research at the second meeting of the EU Internet Forum in Brussels. The meeting was convened by Mr. Dimitris Avramopoulos, EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, and Mr. Julian King, Commissioner for the Security Union. Contributors included, in addition to ...

Identifying key knowledge gaps in the area of preventing violent extremism was the main focus of a recent EU Radicalisation Awareness Network Centre of Excellence (RAN CoE) research seminar in Vienna (12-13 April 2016). The seminar brought together the RAN editorial board, leading researchers, and practitioners to discuss and debate the latest radicalisation research findings ...

By Matteo Vergani We (myself and Ana-Maria Bliuc) just published a brief research-paper in the Italian magazine “Security, Terrorism and Society“. We used the computerized text analysis program LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to investigate the evolution of the language across the first 11 Issues of Dabiq. Our paper shows ISIS’ increasing concern with ...

VOX-Pol Programme Manager Lisa McInerney is speaking at a meeting of the Radicalisation Awareness Network at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London today. The meeting, ‘Bringing together industry partners and CVE practitioners – Innovative cooperation to counter extremism online’ is being held to engage private sector partners in the counter-narrative challenge and to organise ...

VOX-Pol participated in a two-day meeting hosted by the Insafe Network of Safer Internet Centres in Prague from 27-28 May. Insafe is a European network of 31 national awareness centres comprising the 27 EU member states and Iceland, Norway, Russia and Serbia. Each of the national centres implement awareness and educational campaigns, runs a helpline, ...

by Maura Conway Some scholars and others remain skeptical of a significant role for the Internet in processes of violent radicalisation. There is increasing concern on the part of other scholars, and increasingly also policymakers and publics, that high and increasing levels of always-on Internet access and the production and wide dissemination—and thence easy availability—of ...

Millions of Euro are being pumped into producing online content aimed at preventing young people from being drawn into extremist activities via the Internet, especially via social media content consumption and interaction. Orla Lehane, a PhD candidate at Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government, is utilising Grounded Theory methods to explore whether on ...

by Matthew Francis A parliamentary inquiry has cleared MI5 of failing to prevent the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in May 2013. This despite the fact that his killers, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, were both subjects of previous investigations by the security services – investigations which showed that both men had been radicalised. Inevitably this conclusion ...

by Philip Seib The State Department is trying hard to counter online propaganda from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The information battleground includes Twitter and video messages, terrain that ISIL knows well. In addition to having too little money and too few people, the department is forced to conform to federal rules requiring that its ...