Welcome to Volume 12, Issue 9 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter.
UPCOMING VOX-Pol PUBLICATION
A new VOX-Pol report will be launched in a few weeks time, titled Researching the Far Right Safely in Academia: Current Practices and Constraints by Antonia Vaughan. The launch date and online event will be announced soon!
Dr. Antonia Vaughan recently completed a PhD in Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath. Her thesis investigated the ethics of researching the far right – including researcher safety – and the mainstreaming of the far right online.
Researchers of risky topics have benefitted from a burgeoning literature on researcher safety, including that specifically focused on researching the far right. Much of this literature has focused on tackling urgent concerns and providing practical advice, targeting the individual and the institution. Drawing on 21 interviews with researchers of the far right and manosphere, this report complements these efforts by detailing how researcher safety is impacted by environmental factors. Focusing on three key stakeholders – the institution, the manager and the researcher themselves – the report illustrates how individual efforts and interactions between stakeholders have significant implications for safety and underlines the need to situate researchers within the academic context.
Arguing that barriers to safety pivot on both what is known about risk and what is possible to mitigate, the report highlights areas to focus on to improve both current and future practice. To examine the impact of stakeholders and how their interactions have an impact on safety, this report proposes a matrix highlighting the varying roles, responsibilities and capabilities of each actor. In doing so, it illustrates the necessity of understanding the researcher within a broader framework rather than focusing on the researcher in isolation. These findings contribute to concerns about the ability of researchers to safeguard themselves, and the importance of environmental factors in affecting the safety of researchers. Although focused on researchers of the far right, the findings are likely applicable to researchers of extremism more broadly, who face similar harms in the same environment.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Call for Papers for Special Issue of Mobile Media & Communication
‘Messaging Applications and Global Cultures of Mobility’
This Special Issue encourages regional and inter-disciplinary contributions–and from scholars at all career stages–to collectively unpack how/why chat applications intersect with mobility, all the while tracing these impacts on individuals, politics, culture and society.
This call may be of interest to colleagues who focus on terrorism, online extremism and associated phenomena. Papers should explicitly focus, to some degree, on how messaging applications drive or facilitate movement. Potential topics include: how online extremist actors have relied on messaging applications to organise violent demonstrations, how a terrorist attack was coordinated in real-time across messaging applications, and so on.
Important dates:
- Extended abstracts submission (500-700 words): 1 November 2025
- Acceptance decisions: 15 November 2025
- First draft paper submission (8,000 words): 15 March 2026
- Second draft paper submission (8,000 words): 15 July 2026
- Final acceptance: 15 November 2026
Find out more and make a submission at this link.
UPCOMING EVENT
In partnership with the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, on 18th September the VOX-Pol Institute is hosting the webinar ‘The Changing Nature of Radicalization Online’. It will run from 9:00 – 10:00 (ET) / 14:00 – 15:00 (BST).
Recent atrocities such as the US school shooting at Annunciation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the stabbing at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport, UK, exemplify current trends regarding youth radicalization and recruitment to extremist spaces. Close analysis of these two events shows, for example, the extreme mixing of ideological and behavioral signals that are increasingly present in these attacks and originate in nihilistic violent extremist spaces. Changes in the recruitment landscape implicate behavioral processes on social media sites, gaming sites, and more. Join us to analyze these trends and discuss the critical challenges cases like these pose for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners.
To register, please email info@voxpolinstitute.org
RECENT PUBLICATIONS BY VOX-Pol MEMBERS
VOX-Pol Member Michael Loadenthal has published a book chapter, co-authored with Rebecca Wilson, titled: He’s a Fed: Snitchjacketing and the Far- Right’s Culture of Paranoia. It’s part of the book Contemporary Far-Right Culture The Art, Music, and Everyday Practices of Violent Extremism, edited by Marc-André Argentino and Amarnath Amarasingam.
VOX-Pol Member Lydia Khalil and colleagues have published an interactive online tool ‘Dynamics of Democratic Erosion‘, a systems map that conceptualises how democratic decline occurs. This special feature was produced by the Lowy Institute in collaboration with the Toda Peace Institute.
ON THE VOX-Pol BLOG
The VOX-Pol Blog takes a break in August and instead of posting, we share the most-read posts of the year. This past year (2024/25) VOX-Pol has published a total of 48 Blog posts. Over ten of these articles were on the topic of ‘incels’ and ‘online misogyny’. ‘Young people’ were the primary focus of five posts, and the new topic of ‘mixed, unclear, and unstable ideology’(MUU) appeared in two widely-shared posts.
The most-read posts of the year are:
4. The Trump Manosphere: Reactionary Male Supremacy, Misogyny and Accelerationist Violence in the Post-Election Era by Joshua Bowes and Jennifer West.
3. Beyond Western Misogyny: A growing incel movement in Turkey? by Kamil Yilmaz and Joe Whittaker.
2. Social media influencers, the far right and their potential impact on youth (radicalisation) by Sophia Rothut, Darian Harff & Cornelius Puschmann.
1. Nazis at the salad bar: The National Workers’ Alliance and mixed, unclear, and unstable ideology by Gerard Gill. (This post was also published in a Spanish translation.)
Is your research related to online extremism and/or terrorism? Would you like to share some of your findings or reflections with an audience, including other researchers, policymakers, law enforcement, social media company representatives, and others, with similar interests? If so, how about contributing to the VOX-Pol Blog?
Advice and instructions on how to contribute to the Blog is here.
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And find us on LinkedIn @VOX-Pol.