Terrorism

By Daniel E. Levenson Successful ideologues and leaders in extremist movements have long been aware of the power that misleading, but powerfully Manichean, pseudo-historical narratives can have on audiences. The foundation of this propagandistic material is often rooted in self-serving mythologies which justify the scapegoating of others and validation of the deeply felt grievances that ...

By Joshua Farrell-Molloy On 26 April the UK became the first country in the world to proscribe the ‘Terrorgram Collective’. From today, membership, support, or the display of articles associated with the network is now illegal and can carry a punishment of up to 14 years in prison or an unlimited fine. The listing of Terrorgram represents a ...

By Shannon Zimmerman Last Saturday, a man armed with a large knife entered the Westfield shopping centre at Bondi Junction in Sydney. He proceeded to attack over a dozen people before being killed by a policewoman. Video footage appears to show the attacker avoiding men and targeting women. Five of the six people killed in ...

By Francisco Javier Saavedra Macías, Universidad de Sevilla In May 1097, during the siege of Nicaea, crusaders catapulted the severed heads of prisoners over the walls surrounding the city, with the aim of terrorising their enemy. The strategy worked. On June 19 of the year the crusaders captured the city. However, only those who lived ...

By Lindsay Hahn Terrorists killed more than 20,000 people in 2019 alone. According to the Global Terrorism Database, more than 900,000 actors were responsible for directly perpetrating over 200,000 terrorist attacks between the years of 1970-2019. Countless additional actors are likely to have indirectly helped the groups plan their attacks. Although it might seem reasonable ...

By Sean McCafferty & Kamil Yilmaz This analysis is Part 2 of a two-part post. Both are based on data gathered between 7 October and 9 October 2023 from two Telegram channels sharing propaganda related to the unfolding violence in Israel and Palestine: an official Telegram channel of the al-Qassam Brigades and an unofficial pro-Hamas ...

By Sean McCafferty & Kamil Yilmaz On the morning of Saturday, 7 October 2023, a barrage of rockets targeted Israel from Gaza, followed by militants from a variety of Gaza-based terrorist organisations breaking through checkpoints and military positions around Gaza and entering Israel. This led to unprecedented violence against nearby Israeli military positions, kibbutzim, and ...

By Simon a. Purdue Introduction Reproductive politics lie at the very heart of the gender ideology of the extreme-right. The ‘propagation of the race and nation’ has been a core tenet of social thought across the right-wing spectrum for the past two hundred years, and while within conservatism the racial rhetoric has been largely replaced ...

By Sophia Rothut, Heidi Schulze, Diana Rieger, Catherine Bouko, Brigitte Naderer The European regulation on addressing the dissemination of terrorist content online (TCO Regulation) is, like the DSA, an approach to combating the spread of terrorist content online that is (1) transnational (EU-wide) and (2) holds Hosting Service Providers (HSPs) accountable. According to this regulation, ...

By Tom Thorley & Erin Saltman This article summarises a recent paper published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism that forms part of a special issue on the practicalities and complexities of (regulating) online terrorist content moderation. The special issue contains papers that were presented at Swansea University’s Terrorism and Social Media Conference 2022. Technical ...