Violent Extremism Research Articles

Building Democratic Resilience: Protecting the Public Sphere From Violent Extremism

Building Democratic Resilience: Protecting the Public Sphere From Violent Extremism

EXAMINING POWERS THROUGH SURYANI’S REPRESENTATION AGAINST SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WREGAS BHANUTEJA’S PHOTOCOPIER

This study examines the representation of woman against sexual violence in Photocopier, an Indonesian film directed by Wregas Bhanuteja. In film, women as sexual violence victims are often misrepresented through stereotyping as the helpless victims who need men’s help to deal with the situation or showing extreme violence against their perpetrators to exact revenge. If not stereotyped, women as sexual violence victims also tend to be fetishized as their victimized body often sexualized for erotic pleasures. In its protagonist, Sur, Photocopier took different approach by representing the victim as a woman with powers to fight against the sexual violence she experienced. This study focuses in examining how Sur exerts her powers and how those powers impacted the sexual violence case that she experienced. The study is conducted qualitatively using content analysis method which examines the visual aspects as well as dialogues from the film and applying Amy Allen’s theory of feminist power relation. The analysis identifies that Suryani possesses and exercises all three types of feminist power posed by Allen, which are “power-to,” “power-over,” and “power-with,” as a sexual violence victim. The study reveals that while the film tries to represent Sur as a powerful woman, she is also adjacently represented as a stereotypical powerless sexual violence victim who is helpless to fight against her perpetrators even after exercising all her powers both personally and collectively. However, such stereotypical representation may be necessary to show the reality of sexual violence victims and as a form of criticism against the mishandling of sexual violence case.

Estimating the prevalence of terrorism under control policies. A statistical modelling approach

Measuring the intensity of the prevalence of radicalization plays a vital role in countering violent extremism. Hence, several mathematical models have been proposed aiming to describe the complex dynamics of this social phenomenon. It should be noted that existing literature mainly includes deterministic compartmental models, while the measuring of the extremism's intensity is based on the basic reproduction number R0. However, deterministic approaches can only provide an estimation of the mean tendency of the phenomenon, while the R0 index is accompanied by several drawbacks. In this paper, we propose a new compartmental scheme which considers control policies, containing susceptible, resistant, extremist and under-rehabilitation cases. The aforementioned model is combined with the methodology of continuous time Markov processes, leading to the quantification of not just the mean trend but the uncertainty of the phenomenon, too. Moreover, we introduce two new stochastic descriptors for the assessment of the radicalization's severity, namely the exact (Rε) and aggregate (Ra) reproduction numbers that address the limitation of the widely used R0 index. Emphasis is placed on the presentation of theorems and algorithms that describe the computation of their complete distribution functions. We derive formulas for the calculation of elasticities, and perform a perturbation analysis, shedding light on the overall impact of system's parameters on the selected stochastic descriptors. A series of illustrative examples is presented for the illustration of the derived theoretical properties, along with numerical comparisons between the three reproduction numbers. Finally, based on the proposed measures, we pinpoint the most impactful factors, and discuss control policies that facilitate the effective combating of the negative repercussions of terrorism.

Exposure to Childhood Adversity and Intimate Partner Violence in a Sample of Incarcerated Women in Australia.

Women who use violence represent one of the fastest growing groups within the Australian prisoner population, including Aboriginal women who are more likely to be incarcerated than non-Aboriginal women for violent crimes. Many incarcerated women report histories of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and intimate partner violence. This exploratory study examines baseline data from a sample of 167 women in 3 Western Australia women's prisons enrolled in a gender-specific violent behavior program. It describes their exposure to intimate partner violence, head injury, and childhood adversities. Overall, 94% of women had experienced at least one childhood adversity (median 6), and 94% reported being a victim of physical violence by a current or former intimate partner. Aboriginal women were more likely than non-Aboriginal women to report that a family member was incarcerated as a child (p = .001). There was an association between an increased number of ACEs and head injury with a loss of consciousness (p = .008). Overall, these results present a harrowing picture of childhood exposure to adversity and violence in adulthood. Successful rehabilitation of women incarcerated for violent crimes should be cognizant of the histories of extreme violence endured by most of these women.

Locus of Control and Mental Health: Human Variation Complicates a Well-Established Research Finding.

Locus of control (LoC) refers to one's expectation that life outcomes and (mis)fortune are driven largely by one's own actions or abilities (internal LoC) or by external factors (e.g., powerful others, chance; external LoC). There is a large literature demonstrating an association between internal LoC and positive mental health outcomes. However, this research is conducted mostly in high-income, Global North settings, with limited consideration of cross-cultural variability. This short report explores how LoC relates to mental health when considered in a less-studied context: in a setting of stark structural violence and in relation to supernatural agents. I conducted a community-based survey in rural Haiti (n = 322) that assessed sent spirit-related locus of control (LoC-S) and mental health. Among individuals experiencing higher levels of daily stressors, depressive and anxiety symptoms were high regardless of LoC-S. However, for individuals facing low-to-moderate daily stressors, external LoC-S (believing one does not have control in relation to sent spirits) was associated with lower depressive and anxiety symptoms, though this interaction did not hold for anxiety after controlling for covariates. Though initially a nonintuitive finding, I contextualize this outcome in relation to ethnographic work in Haiti, showing that the ability to explain misfortune via the supernatural world can serve as a form of blame displacement. In a context where extreme structural violence means that individuals realistically have little control over their lives, an external LoC better reflects lived experience, helping explain the association with better mental health outcomes.

Reimagining the Relationship Between Hate Crime and Terrorism: A Case Study of New Zealand

ABSTRACT The relationship between hate crimes and terrorism remains a significant policy and academic concern. We provide the first empirical exploration of this relationship in New Zealand, drawing upon an original dataset of right-wing violent extremist (RWVE) incidents between 1997 and 2022. Employing analytical models of escalation and reaction we find evidence of connectivity between hate crime and terrorism, indicating that the links between them have significance for threat assessments of RWVE. We argue that the “either/or” implications of the “close cousins-distant relatives” dichotomy in existing literature on hate crime-terrorism linkages is misleading and identify new dynamics relevant for examining this relationship and monitoring the potential for violent hate crime acting as a barometer for more extreme activity, including terrorism.

Comparison of Women’s Perceptions of Violent Extremism between Ambon City and Yogyakarta City

Comparison of Women’s Perceptions of Violent Extremism between Ambon City and Yogyakarta City

“Today I Die like Jesus Christ”: An Analysis of Ressentiment in Perceptions, Motivations and Justifications of Violent Extremist Manifestos

ABSTRACT Far-right extremists distribute digital manifestos alongside their violent attacks as a method of sensationalizing their acts, dispersing their ideology, and garnering followers. This study sheds light on the psychological characteristics of the perceptions, motivations, and justifications evident in their manifestos. We analyze their self-perceptions as martyrs, warriors, or saviors, their perceptions of world injustice, their motivations of grievance, humiliation, seeking revenge and defense and their justifications founded on absolutist thinking, moral disengagement and us vs. them divisions—mapping out how they deliver their message through the emotional mechanism of ressentiment. We show the complexity of the manifestos content, particularly in reference to the way extremists present themselves as martyrs, warriors, or saviors, the pervasive reference of grievances and frustrations, the shallow social bonds and outgroup dehumanization, their strong motivations to seek revenge and defend, and the morally disengaged justifications of their intentions and actions. This project addresses an important gap in extant literature and offers valuable insights to academics and practitioners on the discourses that promote mobilization and engagement with political violence.

Assessing Evaluative Practice in Protective Security

With the potential implementation of Martyn’s Law in the UK, a national legislation focused on enhancing protective security measures in public and crowded spaces, there is an urgent need to understand effective evaluation in this field. Drawing insights from monitoring and evaluation practices in counter-terrorism, preventing and countering violent extremism and other fields, the article explores how the success of protective security interventions could be defined and measured across various dimensions. In doing so, it aims to contribute not only to the effective implementation of Martyn’s Law but also to the broader evidence base for future interventions in protective security.

Community Narratives in Producing Negative Images: Their Implications to Violent Extremism Recruitment

This study explores how narratives within communities affected by the All-Out war of 2000 contribute to the creation and transmission of enemy images against the government. It examines the role of these stories in fostering a social identity that otherizes the government and discusses the mechanisms of vertical transmission of these images from parents to children. The paper also considers the implications of these narratives for recruitment into violent extremist groups and suggests strategies for reframing stories to mitigate their impact on borrowed trauma.

The Asymmetries of Border Spaces

ABSTRACT Boris Pahor was born in 1913 in Trieste, where he died at the age of 108. In all his works, he tries to reconstruct the conditions of exclusion experienced by himself, his family, his people, and finally all those who resisted the ideological pressures at the height of the Nazi terror, as described in the novel Necropolis (1967). The extreme violence with which assimilation was imposed on the Slovenian minority did not allow him to preserve his original identity. Pahor’s Trieste confirms that spaces exposed to a constant pressure of assimilation are spaces of undeniable vitality. This perspective should allow us to create a corpus of knowledge that reflects the resilience of cultures exposed to domination. Instead of seeing the margins as a place of exclusion and endemic difficulties, we need to change the narrative that defines them. Margins are the spaces where translation constantly materializes, the spaces of exchanges and transfers, thus the periphery has the capacity for mediation between complex cultural systems.

Exploring the Nexus: Personality Disorders and Their Impact on Violent Extremism, Radicalism, and Activism.

The escalating global concerns surrounding radicalization and violent extremism necessitate a comprehensive understanding and explanation. Identifying the risk factors associated with radicalism and violent extremism is critical to the development of risk assessment, prevention, and intervention strategies. It is imperative to distinguish these risks from civic responsibilities (i.e., activism) to safeguard individual rights. This study aims to examine the association between well-established risk factors for violence-personality disorder symptoms-and violent extremist attitudes, radicalism, and activism. Findings indicate that antisocial personality disorder symptoms were linked to violent extremist attitudes and radicalism, whereas obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms were related to activism. This suggests that obsessive-compulsive personality disorder may signify a readiness for legal and nonviolent political action; in contrast, antisocial personality disorder symptoms signify a readiness for extremist violence and illegal political action.

Extreme Violence in Organizations: Investigating Police Use of Deadly Force

Extreme Violence in Organizations: Investigating Police Use of Deadly Force

OptNet-Fake: Fake News Detection in Socio-Cyber Platforms Using Grasshopper Optimization and Deep Neural Network

Exposure to half-truths or lies has the potential to undermine democracies, polarize public opinion, and promote violent extremism. Identifying the veracity of fake news is a challenging task in distributed and disparate cyber-socio platforms. To enhance the trustworthiness of news on these platforms, in this article, we put forward a fake news detection model, OptNet-Fake. The proposed model is architecturally a hybrid that uses a meta-heuristic algorithm to select features based on usefulness and trains a deep neural network to detect fake news in social media. The <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d$</tex-math> </inline-formula> -D feature vectors for the textual data are initially extracted using the term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighting technique. The extracted features are then directed to a modified grasshopper optimization (MGO) algorithm, which selects the most salient features in the text. The selected features are then fed to various convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with different filter sizes to process them and obtain the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math> </inline-formula> -gram features from the text. These extracted features are finally concatenated for the detection of fake news. The results are evaluated for four real-world fake news datasets using standard evaluation metrics. A comparison with different meta-heuristic algorithms and recent fake news detection methods is also done. The results distinctly endorse the superior performance of the proposed OptNet-Fake model over contemporary models across various datasets.

A Reflection of Humanitarian Responses to Violent Extremism in South West Nigeria

A Reflection of Humanitarian Responses to Violent Extremism in South West Nigeria

Community-Driven Brakes on Violent Extremism: The Case of Non-Radicalization of the Czech Romani Minority

This paper introduces intra-community brakes on domestic violent extremism within the Czech Romani minority. We discuss how the community’s ties to nonviolent networks, approach to ideology, and family attachment worked against manifestations of violent extremism during three major episodes of political violence affecting the Romani in Czechia. The study draws on extensive empirical data gathered through ethnographic and netnographic methods and analytical tools provided by constructivist grounded theory for data analysis. Our work aims to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on the role of protective factors in preventing engagement in extreme forms of political violence. It would also like to encourage scholarly debate on the notion of marginalized groups as active agents maintaining security within their own communities.

Insider perspectives: insights from formers on their role as subject-participants in P/CVE research

ABSTRACT This article examines the contributions of ‘formers’, individuals who were previously affiliated with groups advocating violent extremism but who now work as researchers and practitioners in the P/CVE field. There are a limited number of studies assessing the value added of formers to P/CVE programs. We make two significant contributions to the body of work. First, we examine how formers can contribute not only to P/CVE practice, but to academic research of terrorism, and how their insights and experience can be employed for improving research designs and interview completion rates and responses. Second, none of the extant works incorporates the views of formers themselves in the assessments. Four of the co-authors of this article are formers who publish peer-reviewed and policy institute research, and they present their perspectives on who counts as a former, and how their individual backgrounds inform and bolster their research and praxis. We encourage researchers of political violence to emulate other fields of social science and incorporate appropriately trained formers as subject-participants to improve research in the field.

‘You’re in or You’re out:’ Ethos of Change in the Lives of De-radicalized Youth in the Kenyan Urban Margins

Abstract Notoriously placed, ghettos and slums are perceived as locations for violence, drug abuse, violent gang operations, and other vices. In Kenya, the origin of violent radicalization and extremism has centered on urban margins, some of which are characterized as ghettos or slums due to the complex dynamics of communal interactions and spatial settings. This study draws on ethnographic data to analyze the lives of youth in two urban margins of Kenya whose lived realities were tied to their radicalization, deradicalization, engagement, and disengagement in violent extremism for the Al-Shabaab network. Using empirical data, the article probes the central research question: How do youth make meanings of violent radicalization, de-radicalization, engagement, and disengagement from their lived realities of these urban margins? A critical empirical assessment of this new ethos of change as a result of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE) and development actors’ work in these urban margins reveals a continuum of mixed reactions from ‘feeling good’ to ‘feeling worse’ as young people grapple with new identities, new stigmas, and new realities in reintegrating back into their communities.

“If you don’t have rapport, you haven’t got anything really”: affective intensities, relationality and rapport building in the work of CVE Intervention Practitioners

ABSTRACT Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) continues to be a topic of national and international concern; however, within the field of research, there has been limited engagement with the daily work of CVE intervention. The article presents findings from a study which aimed to better understand the strategies CVE Intervention Practitioners employ, specifically rapport building and the fostering of mutual trust. Drawing upon the accounts of 12 practitioners currently working in Australia, we focus on the complex affective negotiations underpinning the client–practitioner relationship. Our analysis foregrounds relationality, a sense of connectedness and explores the affective labour involved in this work. In theorizing the work of CVE intervention, as a form of affective labour, the paper presents three key themes present in the data 1) rapport building to leverage; 2) transparency to build trust and change mindset; 3) versatility/adaptability.

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing? Violent, Abusive, and Harmful Behavior by the Older Person Toward Their Family Caregivers: A Qualitative Study.

Violent, abusive, and harmful behavior enacted by older adults upon their caregivers represents a distressing and frequently disregarded facet within the domain of caregiving. This qualitative study aims to (a) explore family caregivers' experiences of violent, abusive, and harmful behavior by the older person and (b) explore how violent, abusive, and harmful behavior by the older person affects family caregivers' mental health. This qualitative study encompassed 393 participants, with a diverse age range spanning from 40 to 72 years. All the interviews went through the process of content analysis. For the first objective, findings indicated six emerging themes: Frequent and extreme verbal violence (77.3%); feeling manipulated and controlled by older adults (74.7%); experiencing unpredictable illegal circumstances provoked by older adults (62.1%); experiencing damaging financial issues provoked by older adults (43.1%); experiencing physical violence (34.2.%); and experiencing sexual violence (31.1%). The second objective highlighted four themes: depression and anxiety (89.9 %), anger (81.2%), feeling morally isolated (78.3%), and emotional outbursts (65.1%). Brazilian participants mainly experienced frequent and extreme verbal violence (62.4%). Moreover, depression and anxiety were mainly verbalized by English participants (84.3%). These findings underscore the significant toll that older individuals' violent, abusive, and harmful behavior can have on the mental well-being of family caregivers. This study sheds light on the complex experiences faced by family caregivers and emphasizes the urgent need for targeted interventions to foster healthier caregiving environments. Older individuals' violent, abusive, and harmful behavior toward their caregivers has received limited attention in research and public discourse. The findings of this study call attention to the pressing need of addressing this issue, given its detrimental impact on the mental health of family carers. Recognizing the significance of this topic demands a comprehensive and targeted approach to ensure the well-being and safety of caregivers and older adults.