Violent Extremism Research Articles

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.

Challenging the youth assumptions behind P/CVE: acknowledging older extremists

ABSTRACT Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) interventions are largely based on theories that young people (especially young men) are particularly vulnerable to radicalisation leading to violent extremism. Youth is seen as a vulnerable time of identity formation, separation from family and openness to other influences. However, too much focus on youth as a driver of extremism misses the existence of older participants in extremist violence, clouds understanding of the reasons for their violent acts and neglects an important demographic in P/CVE. In this article, we challenge the “youth radicalisation” thesis which underpins so much P/CVE work and argue that such work needs to acknowledge the existence of older militants who experience long-term and intergenerational engagement with violent movements. We do this through analysis of a series of interviews with 11 older men (and 6 family members), from Ireland/Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, who have been involved in violent extremism. The reasons for their involvement are found to lie in family and community cohesion across interconnected generations in contexts of political conflict. The findings therefore challenge the automatic connection of youth and radicalisation and so call into question P/CVE initiatives which are only youth centric. Instead, it is essential to create interventions based on theories of change that understand intergenerational cohesion, grievances in sectarianised contexts and political interrelationships between states and communities.

The border spectacle during the pandemic: A bottom-up political economy of media within the American border regime

This paper explores the ‘border spectacle’, namely the production and diffusion of images of immigration, in contemporary digital journalism to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic public health crisis overlapped with the dual semantics of illegalisation/victimisation of migrants. This article addresses a gap in the field of political economy of the border spectacle, conducting a bottom-up analysis of the socio-economic and material conditions under which visual narratives of migration and borders are produced and diffused in the case of Mexico. The methodology combines virtual ethnography and in-depth biographical/life stories interviews with three female reporter/photojournalists covering migration issues in Mexico and the Americas and producing accounts that differs significantly from the hegemonic iconography of migration. By analyzing the data collected between 2020 and 2021, we explore the extreme violence, precariousness and health risks, as well as strategies of self-support characterising these media professionals’ experiences. The analysis helps understand the rationale behind the political economy of the media during the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown in Mexico, as well as how the media’s structural frame exposes, amplifies and mediates migration in terms of ‘infectious’ and, therefore, a threat to national communities already vulnerable to the virus. Finally, we highlight the conflict between the purpose of the reporters, who want to provide empathetic, first-hand accounts of migration, on the one hand, and the commercial interests of mainstream media, which tends to seek to follow a hegemonic framing, make some of these images viral to create moral panic against migrants, on the other.

Basic Psychological Needs and Extremism: Understanding Theories Through Meta-Analysis

ABSTRACT Extremist attacks pose a dangerous threat to society and past work suggests that many factors can contribute to radicalization. The present project aims to combine literature from multiple theories of radicalization to meta-analyze the association between basic psychological needs and extremism. From 46 articles containing 75 samples, 248 effect sizes were retrieved (N = 30,082). There is not a significant overall association between basic psychological needs and extremism. However, the operationalization of the need explains a significant amount of variance in the effect sizes, such that need satisfaction is negatively associated with extremism (r = −0.09, 95 percent CI [−0.15, −0.03]) whereas desire for a need is positively associated with extremism (r = 0.21, 95 percent CI [0.14, 0.28]). This finding suggests that how researchers define basic psychological needs is important when examining the role of needs in radicalization and theorists should continue to incorporate them in their models. Furthermore, the nature of extremism explains a significant amount of variance in the effect sizes, such that basic psychological needs are positively associated with Islamist extremism and negatively associated with far-left extremism. Directions for future research and implications for countering violent extremism interventions are discussed.

What Effect does Ideological Extremism have on Mass Shootings? An Assessment of Motivational Inconsistencies, Risk Profiles, and Attack Behaviors

ABSTRACT Much like other violent extremists, some mass shooters embrace inconsistent, mixed, or customized beliefs and attack for a combination of personal and ideological reasons. This makes it difficult to understand what effects ideology has on their behavior. To obtain empirical answers, we studied (1) the frequency of extreme ideological interests and motives among public mass shooters, (2) differences between perpetrators with and without extreme ideological interests, and (3) the degree of consistency between their ideologies and attack outcomes. Findings suggest that from 1966–2023, approximately one-quarter of public mass shooters in the United States had extreme ideological interests and roughly 70 percent of them were partially motivated by those extreme beliefs. Mass shooters with and without extremist interests showed similar rates of childhood trauma, mental health problems, suicidality, crisis, substance abuse, and criminal records, but ideological shooters were more likely to create legacy tokens, use semi-automatic or automatic rifles, kill strangers and non-white victims, and be copycats or role models. It appears extremism was sometimes a correlate and sometimes a cause of their behavior, with a clear effect on shaping some attacks. Nevertheless, inconsistencies were common, and many attackers did not target locations or victims that fit their ideological enemies.

Factors in terrorist risk assessment: a rapid evidence assessment of the extremism risk guidance (ERG22+) factors

Purpose Since 2011, the Extremism Risk Guidance (ERG 22+) has been the primary risk assessment framework used for terrorist and violent extremist offenders in England and Wales. The aim of this study was to conduct a rapid evidence assessment to examine the research literature on the ERG22+ factors and to identify possible significant new and emerging knowledge around potential new factors. Design/methodology/approach Searches were conducted of the Google Scholar database to identify relevant literature published between 2012 and 2020. In total, 29 documents were identified, which examined new radicalisation models and frameworks, 339 were identified, which explored to some extent one or more of the current ERG factors, and a further 138 articles were identified, which focused on potentially relevant additional issues/factors. Findings Most of the ERG factors were the focus of substantial research activity between 2012 and 2020. Six factors, however, received very little research attention. Potential implications of these trends are considered. Ten research themes were identified with the potential to either form new factors or which could play a significant role in the updating or revision of some existing factors. Originality/value This paper is the first rapid evidence assessment on the ERG22+ risk factors. It provides an important picture of the published scientific research of potential relevance in this area and helps to inform the review process for the ERG22+.

Risk and threat assessment instruments for violent extremism: A systematic review.

Risk and threat assessment instruments for violent extremism: A systematic review.

Do violent extremists govern?

Do violent extremists govern? This may seem like a naïve question as groups inspired by the extremist versions of Salafi Islamic theology of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are most often presented as ruthless, violently brutal actors that only rule through fear and coercion. However, as time has moved on and more analyses have come to the fore, a more nuanced picture has emerged. These findings need to be taken seriously because while al-Qaeda and the Islamic State’s power and appeal may be waning in the Middle East, elsewhere, groups inspired by them have grown stronger. One case is the Sahel, and the challenge that groups like the al-Qaeda-inspired Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM) and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) represent to international order should not be underestimated. They have gained ground in Mali and Burkina Faso and are also starting to threaten West Atlantic states with important harbours for global trade, such as Benin, Ghana and Togo. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that we understand what these groups are. While their leaders may adhere to violent extremist interpretations of religion and use force and violence, they are also smart, wise, and know how to plan and strategise, and have developed skilful tactics for dealing with civilian populations that come under their influence.

How Far-Right Extremism Changed American Body Politic

Abstract Aggressive rhetoric was part and parcel of the rising Tea Party and the related anti-Obama conspiracy theories. The argument here is that Donald J. Trump, as the leading public promoter of Birther rumors, first-time presidential candidate, and U.S. president, played a starring role in bringing hate speech, violent threats, and political violence into the political mainstream. As a result, political violence increased significantly and several violent far-right extremist groups, domestic terrorist entities, were newly founded after Trump announced his presidential campaign in mid-2015. As ex-president and once again presidential candidate, Trump glorified the criminally convicted participants in the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021 and honored violent far-right fringe groups that were active in the late 20th century while threatening revenge against his political enemies. To assess, whether Trump, as 47th U.S. president, would be able to have his political foes investigated and jailed upon his return to the highest office, we looked for answers in the Heritage Foundation's “Project 2025,” the most detailed blueprint for the dismantling of the “deep state” and the best-laid plan for a takeover by Trump and vetted conservative “Make America Great Again” loyalists in January 2025.1 Although the sole focus here is on the rhetoric of far-right extremism and violence in the past 15 years, there were no similarly extreme far-left hate speech patterns and violent extremism related to the Democratic Party during the same time.