Week in Review for Violent Extremism and Terrorism Analysis: 2023-03-20 & 2023-03-27
Happy Tuesday everyone, it has been a very busy two weeks on my end. I am happy to share that I have successfully defended by PhD dissertation, which received an “outstanding” score. Further my dissertation was accepted “as submitted”. Therefore, here is a two week recap from the field of violent extremism and terrorism analysis.
1) Washington Institute for Near East Policy “Islamic State Select Worldwide Activity Map”
The Islamic State Select Worldwide Activity Interactive Map provides a novel, accessible wa; to understand the Islamic State's global reach and activities, offering a clearer illustration than text alone could do. It also moves beyond a traditional scholarly focus on attack data, offering content from IS media, designations, and legal cases. The map will fill a gap by making readily available information on the group's activities all over the world. One of the biggest knowledge deficits during the Islamic State's resurgence involved the group's development overtime. This IS map helps correct such misconceptions by not only documenting the group's recent activities but also providing a deep, archival historical narrative of a changing, adaptive movement. The map also highlights where the group is operating and expanding today and what these developments could portend for the future. This guards against wishful thinking and the over- or understatement of certain threats without sufficient evidence. The interactive component only makes the process more engaging and the facts clearer to see. Whether or not IS recaptures territory or reengages in large-scale external operations, researchers and officials will have a one-stop repository for understanding current trends and the background that informs them.
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2) Understanding Involvement in Terrorism and Violent Extremism: Theoretical Integration through the ABC Model
Scholars seeking to understand why individuals become involved in terrorism and violent extremism rely on a multitude of theoretical frameworks. While these are commonly interpreted as being in antagonistic opposition, the core premise of this article is that further advances in our understanding of this violence are contingent upon us treating them as complementary. Limiting ourselves to three frameworks that are perhaps most in tension, we survey the core premises of the rational choice perspective (RCP), the social identity perspective (SIP), and the ideological perspective (IP), identifying opportunities for theoretical integration. We argue that individuals are driven to involvement in this violence by both personal rewards and collective objectives, making both the RCP and SIP frameworks indispensable. We also conclude that SIP interpretations are incomplete without the IP, as ideologies play a pivotal role in constructing and amplifying ingroup and outgroup identities. The RCP is also deficient in the absence of the IP as many rewards that motivate involvement can only be understood through reference to the ideational context in which they are conferred. Systematic recognition and application of this theoretical complementarity is facilitated, we further argue, by the Attitudes-Behaviors Corrective (ABC) Model, which we apply as a heuristic device throughout the article.
3) Elon Musk’s Twitter pushes hate speech, extremist content into ‘For You’ pages
A Washington Post analysis found that accounts following dozens of Twitter handles pushing hate speech were subjected to an algorithmic echo chamber, in which Twitter fed additional hateful and racist content to users.
4) Violent Extremist Disengagement and Reintegration: Lessons from Over 30 Years of Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration
Recent questions surrounding the repatriation, rehabilitation, and reintegration of those who traveled to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the reintegration of violent extremists in conflict zones including Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, and Mali, and the impending release of scores of homegrown violent extremists from prisons in the United States and Europe have heightened policymaker and practitioner interest in violent extremist disengagement and reintegration (VEDR). Although a number of programs to reintegrate violent extremists have emerged both within and outside of conflict zones, significant questions remain regarding their design, implementation, and effectiveness. To advance our understanding of VEDR, this report draws insights from a review of the literature on ex-combatant disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR). The literature on DDR typically adopts a “whole of society” approach, which helps us to understand how systemic factors may influence VEDR at the individual level and outcomes at the societal level. Despite the important differences that will be reviewed, the international community’s thirty-year experience with DDR—which includes working with violent extremists—offers important insights for our understanding of VEDR.
5) Advances in Hashing for Counterterrorism
As terrorists and violent extremists continue to evolve their tactics to exploit digital platforms, we advance our cross-platform efforts in order to counter them. One key cross-platform solution has been the sharing of hashes. “Hashing” has been used to combat online harms for years and is now used in many tech platforms’ efforts to moderate content related to terrorism and violent extremism, along with child sexual abuse material, non-consensual image sharing, and other harms.
Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) ‘s hash-sharing database allows GIFCT member companies to identify if and where terrorists or violent extremists are attempting to exploit their respective platforms by sharing content to promote, recruit, and incite. For this database to continue to be an effective solution, we must continue to enhance its technology and the terrorist and violent extremist content it can address to keep pace with the dynamic and adversarial online threat landscape. Here is my take on how GIFCT is approaching this essential work.
6) The Role of Public Health and its Model in Counterterrorism
Hosts Jessica White and Raffaello Pantucci are joined by Jonathan Metzl and Michael Jones to discuss how the public health model – an epidemiological approach attempting to prevent or reduce a particular illness or social problem in a population by identifying risk indicators – has been applied in preventing and countering violent extremism. Michael highlights how this model provides a way to organise preventative interventions for the wider range of potential drivers of violent extremism.
7) "We Are Worth Fighting for": Women in Far-Right Extremism
In this perspective, Eviane Leidig argues that woman play a consequential role in leading men into far-right extremist movements and radicalisation processes.
8) Granola Nazis: Digital Traditionalism, the Folkish Movement and the Normalisation of the Far-Right
This Insight explores the far-right politics of Granola Nazis and Digital Traditionalism – a visual and cultural style in which highly online influencers celebrate a pre-internet culture – a spiritual celebration of ‘ancestral life’ or neo-hippie calls to go ‘back to the land’. While some celebrate farming, health and organic food, others go back to the spirituality, morality and social values not merely of a pre-internet era but of a pre-feminist or pre-civil rights era. Granola Nazis, aligned with groups known as ‘crunchy moms’ and anti-semitic ‘raw egg nationalists’, blend organic living with far-right politics, linking nature and whiteness with anti-feminist leanings.
9) Youths Challenging Violent Extremism through Digital Platforms in the Philippines
This Insight draws on a case study of a group of university students from Muslim Mindanao in the Philippines who implemented a project that aimed to counter Islamophobic hate speech online. This project asked: how can digital platforms be utilised in challenging violence, extremism and hate speech, and what role do young people play?
10) A Picture is Worth a Thousand (S)words: Classification and Diffusion of Memes on a Partisan Media Platform
Memes have become an integral tool of communication in partisan online spaces. Internet memes are defined as “a group of digital items sharing a common characteristic … created with awareness of each other … circulated imitated and/or transformed via the internet by many users.” There has been extensive research on the impact and properties of misinformation, as well as methods for platforms to moderate misinformation. However, moderation policies and algorithms capable of filtering out meme content with extremist foundations are lacking. Moderating supremacists’ memes through algorithms is difficult as images are not as easily detectable as text. Moreover, memes often embody inside jokes among users or have an unassuming image form that hides political intent. Building on prior research on identification of terrorist imagery, this report explores algorithmic approaches to classifying harmful meme content and exploring their patterns of diffusion.
Using state-of-the-art deep learning image and visual rhetorical analysis, we examine memes on an alternative (or fringe) platform by categorising them into themes of gender, race, partisanship and violence. This method further reveals the transmission rates of the memes associated with these themes. We propose a unique methodology that combines automatic image clustering with network analysis, developing a framework to compare the transmission rates of memes at different timepoints. In so doing, we provide experts with a working model of meme content filtering to help platforms to identify and filter memes with supremacist topics; the model also allows for the testing of image attributes to aid the development of a toolkit to understand which memes are spread in alt-tech platforms.
11) Into the Abyss: QAnon and the Militia Sphere in the 2020 Election
The project used the grounded theory-inspired software, “Delve,” to insert transcripts from official court documents from the Department of Justice, video clips published by news outlets, news articles, publicly available social media posts, and public interviews with QAnon-adhering militia members arrested for crimes on January 6th. These quotes were then coded within the transcripts based on their reflection of militia ideology, QAnon language and conspiracies, the 2020 election, and other ideas more broadly found within the far-right. This paper explores three prevailing categories within the data: government corruption, apocalypticism, and defense. Analysis of these categories suggests that QAnon appeals to QAnon-adhering militia members because it aligns with existing foundational militia concepts and conspiracies. Additionally, while the pandemic accelerated QAnon’s appeal to militia members, the 2020 election cemented this trend. This paper assesses that, in the future, QAnon’s growing presence within the militia-sphere will increase convergences between militias and other far-right groups, as well as draw individuals from the mainstream into the militia-sphere.
12) Belgian man dies by suicide following exchanges with chatbot
A young Belgian man recently died by suicide after talking to a chatbot named ELIZA for several weeks, spurring calls for better protection of citizens and the need to raise awareness.
13) The Journal for Deradicalization Publishes Issue No. 34
The Journal for Deradicalization (JD) is an independent and peer reviewed academic open access online journal about the theory and practice of deradicalization and processes of violent extremist radicalization worldwide. The journal publishes four issues per year (quarterly) and seeks to provide a platform for established scholars as well as academics, policy makers and practitioners in this field.
14) Dogs and Cats Living Together? Explaining the Crime-Terror Nexus
Why do some terrorist groups cooperate with criminal organizations? This behavior is puzzling because there are reputational reasons for each of these kinds of groups to avoid the other, yet such cooperation seems to be increasingly common. The growing literature on the “crime-terror-nexus” examines terrorist-criminal cooperation, but questions remain. We discuss relevant research, and present hypotheses. Analysis of nearly 400 terrorist organizations using a newly-coded measure of inter-organizational cooperation suggests that certain types of terrorist groups are more likely to work with organized crime: those that are involved in the drug trade, cooperate with other terrorist groups, are older, or are more lethal. These relationships are robust. We also find some evidence that the crime-terror nexus is more likely for groups that have state sponsors, have larger memberships, operate in more capable countries, or operate in less-democratic countries. There is also some evidence that ethnically-motivated terrorist groups are less likely to cooperate with organized crime. Interestingly, there is little or no support for the idea that the nexus is related to territorial control or religious ideology. These findings go against some previous research and suggest steps for future analysis.
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