On Sept. 11, 2001, one of us (Darrell) was teaching a political science course at Brown University, while the other (Nicol) was four days away from her wedding in Westchester County. The morning of those infamous terrorist attacks, Darrell had finished his lecture and while walking across campus encountered a…
Millions of people stuck at home will turn to social media, where disinformation is rife. Radical Islamists and far-right groups are exploiting widespread confusion and fear to spread hate.
On March 4, 2020, Ms. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, presented her new report on human rights impact of policies and practices aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism. In the report, the Special…
Extremist exploitation of social media platforms is an important regulatory question for civil society, government, and the private sector. Extremists exploit social media for a range of reasons—from spreading hateful narratives and propaganda to financing, recruitment, and sharing operational information. Policy responses to this question fit under two headings, strategic…
“Each week, a young man who sells shoes at a market in southern Kyrgyzstan loses a day of work to travel to the open prison where he is serving a three-year sentence. But the crime for which he was convicted, possession of “extremist” material, no longer exists. When Kyrgyzstan overhauled…
“15 March 2019 saw four issues collide and explode with horrific brutality into our collective consciousness. It was truly a stripping away of naivety and innocence for our country. Those four issues are: Decades long failure of New Zealand governments and agencies to protect citizens from Military Style Semi-Automatic (MSSA)…
“Only four months into the start of the new decade, Australia has faced not one but two national crises: a bushfire disaster that has caused unprecedented damage to the natural environment and livelihoods, and now the Covid-19 pandemic, a global crisis which has hit Australia and already resulted in unprecedented…
“While the influence of social media on the spread of violent extremist narratives and online radicalisation processes has recently become a focal point of research in the Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) field, most of the studies thus far have focused on Western countries and have often been aimed at analysing…
“The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the different initiatives focused on Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) that have been conducted by the international donor community in Kyrgyzstan since 2016 and to offer some recommendations on how to make the international engagement in this field more effective….
“This report summarizes the first part of the HEX-NA project and focuses on exploring different levels and types of policy on countering violent extremism (CVE) in the Nordic countries (Iceland excluded). HEX-NA is the abbreviation for Handling Extremism – Nordic Approaches, a three-year research project (2018-2021) funded by Nordforsk under…
“To effectively counter fascist and far-right extremism – viewed together under the umbrella term ‘radical right’ here – you need to understand it first. Which groups are revolutionary or violent? Who are the most dangerous figures, and why? And vitally, what are the best ways to counter the radical right?…
A number of far-right extremists have recently taken to social media platforms to spread conspiratorial content about COVID-19. Such conspiracy theories range from the virus being a biological weapon created by the Chinese government, to the predictable anti-Semitic tropes of ‘globalism’ claiming it was developed by the tech philanthropist Bill…
