Al Shabaab has engaged in increasingly menacing attacks, usually against civilian soft targets, since the 2013 strike at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, which killed 67 people. In December 2014, al Shabaab killed 36 non-Muslim Kenyan quarry laborers in the Mandera region near the Somali border; it be-headed several…
The central challenge for sub-Saharan Africa is to build accountable, capable governments that can deliver security and inclusive growth. Research into the drivers, trends and characteristics of violence in Africa may help achieve these goals. This paper firstly presents global and African trends in armed conflict since 1960, while looking…
While the Islamic State is under pressure in Syria and Iraq, the group’s crowdsourced external operations capability remains a threat inside the United States, inspiring individuals to act in its name• In the month of June alone, there have already been five arrests of individuals in the United States on…
On July 20, over 30 students were killed in a bomb attack in southern Turkey• Despite the suspicions expressed by some Kurds, the likely culprit of the bombing is the Islamic State• The attack follows a clampdown on the Islamic State in Turkey, with multiple arrests• Turkey may have decided…
This study questions whether the perspectives of security and intelligence serve educators well enough in the early stages of radicalisation. Assigned to signal deviant behaviour, educators are unwittingly drawn into a villain-victim imagery of their students. This imagery seems to impede a genuine educational outlook on radicalisation. Key notions of…
A video on education to prevent violent extremism by the United States delegation to UNESCO.
The presence of violent extremist offenders in prison can be a source of concern for prison authorities and policy officials. Not only is there fear of the spread of extremist ideologies among the inmate population, but also there is the worry that radicalized detainees will engage in extremist activities after…
The influence of terrorist groups operating on the Lebanese-Syrian border, Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, and the increasing sense of humiliation and powerlessness amongst Sunnis since Hezbollah’s take¬over of west Beirut in 2008 is breeding concern about the radicalization of Lebanon’s Sunni community.
These days, the foreign fighters phenomenon is omnipresent on the agenda of police officers, prosecutors, de-radicalisation experts, researchers, policy makers, municipalities, governments, international organisations and think and do tanks. The problem is too complex and multi-faceted to analyse in just a few pages, so the following commentary, based on a…
Flows of foreign fighters to the current conflicts in Syria and Iraq are recent examples of a broader phenomenon that has seen tens of thousands of individuals travel to various conflict zones in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere over the last three decades.1 In February 2015, the U.S….
Arguably, there has been only limited discussion of the issue of the involvement of a number of Indonesian Muslim youth in radicalism and terrorism. One can refer to a few research conducted by such institutions as the PPIM and CSRC UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, and LAKIP that showed the tendency…
The purpose of this intelligence summary is to document and assess the significance of open source reports regarding ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) activity outside of Iraq and Syria (ISIS Abroad).
