Online communities are vast, complex spaces attracting diverse users, offering support and connection, but also spreading harmful content, including misogyny and extremism. Current research on online communities explores user roles and community structures within single communities. We extend this by examining engagement across multiple communities using over 4 million Reddit…
The Guidance Note on ‘Ensuring Respect for Human Rights while Taking Measures to Counter the Financing of Terrorism’ provides practical and actionable recommendations to UN Member States, financial institutions, and other stakeholders to ensure that efforts to counter financing of terrorism (CFT) fully comply with international human rights law, international…
Peace education has been practiced as a form of global citizenship education for several decades. Since the establishment of the SDGs in 2015, this overlap between the two fields has been further amplified amid enduring and escalating conflicts that now emerge as key components of the contemporary global order. Through…
This report analyses public-private relations between the European (in particular, French) authorities and Facebook, Google (YouTube) and Twitter on the subject of terrorist usage of social media between 2015 and 2019. In a qualitative approach, interview material is mobilised to investigate lived experiences of this early cooperation, focusing on how…
Extremist groups frequently leverage online spaces in recruitment and organization efforts. This research assessed how basic psychological need expression among users of extremist chatrooms was related to forum engagement and hate term use. ∼20,000,000 posts from ∼90,000 users on 233 Discord chatrooms were scraped from a publicly available database. Using a natural…
The GCTF Initiative on Education for the Prevention and Countering of Violent Extremism Conducive to Terrorism was launched in 2023 to further efforts around preventing and countering violent extremism conducive to terrorism and education (PVE-E). Building on the endorsement of the 2014 Abu Dhabi Memorandum for Good Practices on Education and Countering Violent…
This brief provides an overview of Hedayah’s International Research Conference & Global Communications Expo 2024 (RCxEXPO24) by summarizing thematic panels and demonstration presentations and highlighting recommendations for countering extremism, violent extremism and terrorism aimed at informing researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and any other relevant stakeholders. More detailed content from these discussions…
This paper explores the relationship between economic variables, social integration and susceptibility to extremism in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. By analysing 415 interviews conducted with young people, activists and practitioners between 2021 and 2023, we have discerned patterns in the influence of economic conditions on radicalisation….
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…
Research indicates both similarities and differences in the rhetoric employed by far-right and violent jihadi extremists. This article employs natural language processing and linguistic analysis to investigate identity construction in selected far-right (FR) and jihadi extremist (VJE) English material. We assess inter-group differences at the level of the subject, e.g….
In the early 2000s, governments’ need to understand and prevent the process of radicalization and violent extremism created a strong demand for knowledge. Within a few years, a new field was developed within a range of formal institutions, including governments, universities, the media, and outside of it by private and…
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are harms that affect children directly (e.g. physical abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect) and indirectly through their living environment (e.g. conflict between caregivers, witnessing domestic abuse, and caregiver substance abuse, incarceration, or mental illness). There is a growing literature on the link between ACEs and the…
