By Elizabeth Pearson, Ashley A. Mattheis, Joe Whittaker and Maura Conway
This post is a lightly edited excerpt from “Online Extremism and Terrorism Researcher Well-being,” a chapter in the just-published Routledge Handbook of Online Violent Extremism.
Over the last several years, researchers have begun to discuss their experiences of harm in this context. A 2019 press piece by Hannah Allam, titled, “‘It Gets to You.’ Extremism Researchers Confront the Unseen Toll of Their Work” was one of the first to detail online extremism terrorism researchers’ experiences of invasive thoughts, emotional distress, and ensuing guilt and shame. It acknowledged that, unlike professions such as journalism, the field of online extremism and terrorism research had barely begun to assess the scale of the problem.
In recognition of this growing conversation, in 2023, the VOX‐Pol network’s REASSURE project produced an open access report Online Extremism and Terrorism Researchers’ Security, Safety, and Resilience: Findings from the Field; the first publication to detail the harms researchers in our sub-field can experience and their coping mechanisms.
One of the issues REASSURE’s interviewees discussed was the shared obligations of both researcher and institution in ensuring that harms are mitigated or prevented. However, the degree to which each should bear responsibility for this is increasingly contested.
Researchers and Institutions Working Together
One of the central arguments of the REASSURE report was that researchers and their institutions need to work together to ensure that researcher well‐being is appropriately addressed going forward. REASSURE found that most researchers, particularly Early Career Researchers (ECRs) (i.e., PhD students, post-doctoral researchers), had not been prepared for the harms their work might pose: mostly, nobody had really told them.
Two subsequent studies that specifically explore ECR experiences of harms corroborate and expand on REASSURE’s findings. Vaughan (2024) examines how ECRs navigate ethics bureaucracy and institutional neoliberalism, finding insufficient support for ECR well‐being and safety. Meanwhile, Brown et al. (2024) in their “Making Academia Suck Less” article focus on US ECRs working with harmful online content, arguing that a structural perspective is needed to address the problems ECRs face.
To cope, REASSURE found that researchers tended to rely on informal networks of colleagues for advice and guidance. Most respondents reported that they only felt comfortable discussing mental health issues resulting from their work with people who they felt would understand where they were coming from; they did not want to traumatise anyone—even a therapist—who was not familiar with, for instance, Islamic State beheading videos.
Additionally, some noted that a culture of macho bravado at times apparent in our sub‐field deterred them from admitting to well‐being issues arising from their research for fear of being perceived as “weak”. Perhaps exemplifying this perception, as well as delegitimising the online research space, Cottee (2024) cites the REASSURE report as evidence that the new generation of researchers embodies “a seeming lack of psychological resilience” and therefore also lack the “necessary fortitude and nerve” to do “real” radicalisation research, i.e. outside the online space (p.17).
This type of narrative, as other studies have shown, works as a gatekeeping mechanism both individually and institutionally by dismissing harms, often those faced disproportionately by marginalised scholars (O’Meara et al., 2024), and further exacerbating experiences of researcher isolation (Mattheis, 2025).
Different Risks of Harm
REASSURE found that anyone “complaining” about harms or seeking to limit their visibility was potentially at risk professionally. Most academic researchers are named public figures, identified as authors on their publications. They are also expected to be physically accessible for student consultation. While facing some of the same harms as law enforcement (Duran cited in Gagnon and Mathieson, 2022), this means they face different risks of harm to police analysts or tech company workers, who are mostly anonymous and not public‐facing.
REASSURE is one of several academic studies providing evidence that university‐based researchers sometimes feel institutions are unaware of these pressures (Mattheis and Kingdon, 2021; Whittaker et al., 2025; Skinner et al., 2023; Gagnon and Gelashvili, 2025). REASSURE found that, when, in the absence of institutional support, individuals were forced to make their own safety decisions, they could feel exposed, at risk professionally, and liable to appear difficult, non‐cooperative, or over‐anxious.
This sense is rooted in academic modes of success that are institutionally predicated on measures such as engagement, impact, invitations to present, and visibility. Choosing to reduce online engagement and visibility led some interviewees to feel they were being unfairly penalised professionally simply for wanting to stay safe.
Vaughan (2024) notes that there is an explicit contradiction between success on the one hand and safety on the other for online extremism and terrorism researchers. She explores safety in this research context as a lack of visibility, control over how information about you is used, and the ability to prioritise your own well‐being. Yet, she notes, academic success is predicated on the opposite: productivity and visibility.
The field is learning only slowly due to a message to researchers—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—that “we should not feel, we should not emote” (Campbell, 2002 cited in Skinner et al., 2023 p.17). Researchers however are not automatons; they respond to the research material as human beings and must engage in emotional labour to manage it. To‐date, their institutions have provided little in the way of assistance.
Institutional Responsibility
One of the key areas emerging in the discussion of institutional responsibility in the REASSURE report was the role of Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs), known in the United States as Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Ethical approval is often required for projects engaging with extremism or terrorism data, particularly in offline spaces. HRECs and IRBs can, however, regard extremism and terrorism research generally as a “problem” category, with the work seen as inherently risky. Committees often struggle to assess the dangers of the proposed research.
Additionally, with respect to online research, not all institutions recognise online as a field of study that even necessitates discussion of protections for researchers, discussion of research ethics, or formal ethical approval. Recognising this, and the threat to the field it constitutes, Morrison, Silke, and McGowan’s (2021) FRETS framework provides guidance for “real‐world” extremism and terrorism research projects; there is little to guide HRECs in the case of online extremism and terrorism research in this framework, however. Morrison and colleagues acknowledge that this is a gap not covered in FRETS, and Conway (2021) has also drawn attention to the issue.
The degree to which institutions are responsible, and particularly the degree to which researchers want their involvement in sensitive research, is tackled in “Catch 22: Catch 22: Institutional Ethics and Researcher Welfare Within Online Extremism and Terrorism Research”, based on REASSURE respondents’ experiences with HRECs/IRBs. The article discusses the dilemma that online extremism and terrorism researchers can face: either the institution is hands‐off and risk may ensue or the institution is hands‐on and the research is subject to scrutiny from those who have little familiarity with extremism and terrorism and/or online research.
This raises the point that “institutions”, in this case, are no more or less than the academics that compose ethics committees, and it is clearly important that they represent and understand the work of those engaged in online extremism and terrorism research and its utility, but also the ensuing potential harms, including the relevance of identity and positionality.
Effective engagement with ethics issues can be thwarted by ethics committees often lacking the time and qualifications to thoroughly assess the growing number of applications, leading to feedback that suggests proposals are unread or misunderstood, however. This can be exacerbated by ethics committee roles typically being unrewarded and seen as low priority compared to teaching and/or research responsibilities (Whittaker et al., 2025, pp.9–10).
Ethical Responsibilities
An alternative view, and one that is increasingly dominant in the literature, as evidenced herein, is that RECs should be understood not merely as collections of individual faculty or researchers, but as integral components of the university as an institution—an institution that bears broader ethical responsibilities, including those tied to its role as an employer. The experience of at least some researchers however is—quoting one interviewee, but reflecting a wide swathe of the literature—that ethical review is “mostly about protecting the university and protecting the institution not necessarily providing solutions to researchers about how to navigate issues of risk” (Whittaker et al., 2025, p.12).
Dr Elizabeth Pearson is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.
Dr Ashley A Mattheis is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Manchester, UK.
Dr Joe Whittaker is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Sociology, and Social Policy at Swansea University, UK and Director of the VOX-Pol Institute.
Professor Maura Conway is Paddy Moriarty Professor of Government and International Studies in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University (DCU), Ireland, and Professor of Cyber Threats in CYTREC at Swansea University, UK.
Image credit: Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash