Terrorism

Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 4 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT Political Theology and the Digital Caliphate: Jihadism in the Age of Globalisation11 June 2026, 10:00-17:00Avenue Campus (room: TBC),University of Southampton This workshop invites contributions that examine the relationship between globalisation and the revival of the caliphate in contemporary Islamist thought and activism. Moving ...

Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 3 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. The Only Way is Ethics: Next Gen Networks Unite The University of Southampton’s Centre for Criminology in the Digital Age is excited to convene an event dedicated to supporting the next generation of researchers working at the cutting edge of sensitive, ethically complex research. This ...

Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 2 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter. A list of confirmed speakers and panels for this year’s TASM conference is now available! Co-organised by CYTREC and VOX-Pol, TASM 2026 will feature more than 70 presentations, delivered by speakers from around the world, as well as a wide variety of different panels, stakeholder-led workshops and the TASM sandpit. ...

By Sam David UpScrolled, a social media platform for microblogging and short-form video sharing, experienced rapid growth in late January 2026 following disputes surrounding TikTok’s US operations. The expansion was initiated largely by allegations that protest-related content was being suppressed on mainstream platforms and, while independent verification of this is limited, the perception of such ...

By Gina Vale In December 2021, terrorism charges against a 14-year-old British girl were dropped—not due to lack of engagement with extremist networks, but on account of the power dynamics of her digital relationships therein. The Home Office Single Competent Authority (SCA) determined that she was a victim of modern slavery in the UK for ...

By Alastair Reed, Anne Craanen, and Arthur Bradley In the digital age, the aftermath of terrorist attacks is often captured and disseminated not only by the perpetrators, but also by bystanders. Mobile phone videos, CCTV footage, body cam recordings, and livestreams routinely surface online within moments of such events. While this bystander content is not ...

By Stuart Macdonald In a recent article, co-authored with Jonathan Hall KC, I made the argument that it is possible to disseminate terrorist propaganda to the public in (what may be regarded by some as) private online spaces. Here, I outline this argument and consider its relevance to the EU’s Terrorist Content Online (TCO) Regulation. ...

By Katy Vaughan Ofcom, as the UK’s independent regulator of ‘Online Safety’ is taking a phased approach to the implementation of the Online Safety Act, which passed into law in October 2023. In December 2024 Ofcom published its statement on the progress of the first phase of implementation which focuses on ‘illegal harms’, including the ...

By Daniel E. Levenson In the early to mid-19th century the organizations and ideologues who would form the vanguard of modern terrorism did a remarkable job of leverage emerging technology for both training and operational purposes. This often took the form of experimentation with new (and often unregulated) materials such as dynamite and crude IEDs ...

Anthony English, The Open University For some, the shocking scenes of violence which have erupted across dozens of locations in England and Northern Ireland will evoke an all-too-real concern – could someone close to me get involved in the violence? Alongside those directly affected by the act of rioting itself, there are another set of ...