Counter-extremism is heavily politicised. For years, leading politicians have failed to engage constructively, shying away from tackling divisive groups head on. But the rise in identity politics should not stop us from making greater efforts to bridge divides and identify and root out those seeking to damage the social fabric…

Less than a year into the new decade, Australia has faced not one, but two natural disasters: the worst bushfires in recorded history, resulting in catastrophic damage to the natural environment and livelihoods; and the COVID-19 pandemic, a global crisis that has resulted in unprecedented restrictions and caused the largest…

Government efforts to counter the propaganda and radicalization that lead to violent extremism are becoming more common around the world, but there’s little research on whether such programs work. Funded by the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. Department of State, RAND conducted three randomized controlled trials—the gold standard in…

Following President Trump’s election, the consensus was that his anti-immigrant and Islamophobic rhetoric would significantly alter the trajectory of U.S. “countering violent extremism” (CVE) approaches both at home and abroad. That trajectory had started to gain momentum during the last years of the Obama administration, particularly following the emergence of…

Politics are politics, but there are serious dangers in making claims about the ability to defeat terrorism in general – and ISIS in particular. One of the most critical limits to the way both Democratic and Republican Administrations have fought the “war” on terrorism is that they have treated it…

In 2020, OpenAI developed GPT-3, a neural language model that is capable of sophisticated natural language generation and completion of tasks like classification, question-answering, and summarization. While OpenAI has not open-sourced the model’s code or pre-trained weights at the time of writing, it has built an API to experiment with…

Radicalization and violent extremism are pressing problems across the world. After initially addressing problems in defining radicalization and extremism, this article sketches a new social-developmental model based on a systematic integration of theories and empirical findings. We propose a three-step model of radicalization starting with ontogenetic social-developmental processes during the…

Countries across the world are fighting a growing threat of violent extremism. Many have begun implementing Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) interventions to prevent or divert individuals from radicalizing to violence. Such CVE interventions run the gamut from large-scale government counterterrorism operations to smaller-scale online and counter-messaging campaigns. In measuring intervention…

Launched in response to the 7/7 London bombings in 2005, Prevent is one strand of the UK government’s counter-terror CONTEST strategy. Prevent, responding to an evolving threat landscape and changing political climate, has been through three iterations already. With the first independent review announced in February 2019 suffering a succession…

Ethno-nationalism and political and religious extremism are one of the main threats to public security and a major challenge in the fight against violent extremism and terrorism, both for our country and for the Western Balkan countries. However, usually when it comes to extremist activity, the public debate focuses on…

Ethno-nationalism and political and religious extremism are one of the main threats to public security and a major challenge in the fight against violent extremism and terrorism, both for our country and for the Western Balkan countries. However, usually when it comes to extremist activity, the public debate focuses on…

Rehabilitation, especially when addressing radicalised and terrorist offenders, is not optional. Our criminal justice and prison services are currently facing increasing numbers of offenders convicted of terrorism-related domestic crimes or assessed as radicalised, as well as returning foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) from conflict areas. Most of these (prospective) prisoners will…