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Ms Martina Lucia Zambelli (Malmö University)29/05/2026, 09:30
More than a decade after the Isla Vista attack, several individuals associated with the incel subculture have carried out acts of mass violence. Existing scholarship has largely sought to determine whether the subculture satisfies established definitional criteria for terrorism. Some scholars argue that incel ideology constitutes an extremist formation with a clear and ideologically driven...
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30. “I’m Right, Not Far-Right”: Feminine Aesthetics and Pro-British Branding in GenAI Amelia ContentAllysa Czerwinsky (University of Manchester)29/05/2026, 09:30
Generative AI has transformed how political and extremist groups create visual content online, with significant implications for disinformation, radicalisation, and online harms. The British far-right’s co-opting of Amelia, a fictional character in Shout Out UK’s anti-extremism game Pathways, serves as an important case study in demonstrating the shifting visual aesthetics used in far-right...
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James Stevenson (University of Bristol)29/05/2026, 09:45
Online environments have become key spaces for the development and expression of extremist and cyber terrorism activity. Understanding how psychological drivers, behaviours, and group dynamics manifest in these spaces remains a significant challenge. Traditional approaches rely on manual qualitative analysis, which is resource intensive and often exposes researchers to bias, fatigue, and...
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Annabel Hoare (Anglia Ruskin University)29/05/2026, 09:45
Governmental counter-radicalisation frameworks are increasingly challenged by contemporary extremist threats, which exhibit converging ideological, affective and transgressive elements across decentralised and fluid networks (Taylor et al., 2026). Against this backdrop, the manosphere serves as an exemplar of the changing extremist threat-scape, characterised as a loose constellation of...
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Ellie Rogers29/05/2026, 10:00
Violent extremists use social media to share content, which can be algorithmically amplified in certain contexts. One countering violent extremism (CVE) strategy aiming to address this problem is algorithmically amplifying counter-speech to target audiences. Examples include Redirection, automatically generating counter-speech and hashtag campaigns. However, there is limited research on the...
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Jana Roth29/05/2026, 10:00
Online incel communities are often characterised by sexual frustration, misogyny, and far-right content. However, less attention has been paid to the economic narratives articulated within these spaces. This paper examines how German-speaking incel communities construct narratives of economic victimhood as a form of structural inequality, fostering social isolation and job disengagement....
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Brant Marcus (University of North Florida)29/05/2026, 11:00
This study examines rhetorical strategies used by extremists on social media and behavioral leakage signals that may accompany escalation toward violence. Simple language-based threat identification methods are limited by the fact that online extremist communities are saturated with inflammatory language, idle threats, and unserious discussions, creating a sea of false-positives that obscure...
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KT Sonnen (Coventry University)29/05/2026, 11:00
Both academically and operationally there is distinct focus on ensuring the physical safety of places, enshrined in law by the recent passed of the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025. However, how safe a location feels may be at odds with how protected from hazards it objectively is, with some studies finding that the more measures were put in the less safe individuals felt (Gastic,...
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Shreya Sinha (Dublin City University)29/05/2026, 11:15
The digitalisation of communication has fundamentally transformed the landscape of terrorism, enabling extremist actors to exploit online platforms for recruitment and propaganda dissemination. The European Union observes this shift in the growing prominence of decentralised threats, particularly lone actors radicalised in digital environments. This paper examines the EU’s evolving response to...
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Chiara Caterina Gatti29/05/2026, 11:15
The evolution of Terrorism Studies reveals a persistent paradox: as threats become increasingly fluid and decentralized, state responses remain anchored to rigid, standardized frameworks.
This paper introduces the "Standardization Trap": a strategic misconception where security apparatuses mistake procedural uniformity for strategic effectiveness. Drawing on the failures of Western...
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Andrew Lawler (University of Liverpool)29/05/2026, 11:30
Operation Banner was the longest operational deployment of the British Army in its history, lasting from 1969 to 2007. Although the last soldiers on this deployment left Northern Ireland in 2007, the impacts of their service are still very much felt today. While many scholars have studied Operation Banner and the role of the British Army in detail, recent historiography has failed to include...
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Kathryn Cribbin (Queen's University, Belfast)29/05/2026, 11:30
Between 1969 and 1998, over 3,600 people were killed as a result of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. During this period, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) and the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), utilised the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland to carry out attacks in Northern Ireland before fleeing back to...
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Lea Brost29/05/2026, 14:30
Islamists are quick to adapt to the evolving landscape online and have repeatedly used social media platforms to recruit people and convince them of their ideas. With TikTok having over 1 billion active users, it is unsurprising that Islamists also use the platform now to mobilise (young) people. To do this, they emulate TikTok aesthetics and trends and use popular-cultural references to make...
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Inger Isabella Storm Sandboe (University of Oxford)29/05/2026, 14:30
This article introduces the concept “imagined extremist communities,” a encapsulating the unique social landscape where right-wing lone actors, despite not being affiliated with organised groups, partake in a form of communal interaction. By examining the cases of Breivik, Harrison Tarrant, and Manshaus, this article illuminates how group-based and lone actors are more alike than what is...
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Hannaneh Akbarpour (Yale University)29/05/2026, 14:45
During the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) offensive in Iraq (2013-2017), the group deployed sophisticated media strategies to attract and recruit both foreign fighters and individuals within Iraq. Through its media network, the extremist organization circulated an ideology marked by extreme violence, ethnoreligious cleansing, and the systematic subjugation of women, alongside the...
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Nazanin Shahbazi (University of Manchester)29/05/2026, 14:45
This work explores how Iranians in the diaspora make sense of their encounter with the 2025–2026 uprising and the subsequent massacre via eight in‑depth interviews, analysed via Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis within a Lacanian psychoanalytic frame. It positions these narratives in the context of human‑rights documentation of nationwide protests met with live fire, mass arrests,...
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Katrien Vanlerberghe (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)29/05/2026, 15:00
Terrorism research has increasingly recognised the importance of narratives in facilitating violence. Yet while narratives are often said to be persuasive because they engage affect, how they do so remains underexplored. This conceptual paper addresses that question by examining how narratives contribute to the emotional conditions under which extremist violence comes to feel both permissible...
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Ruby Bashir (Royal Holloway, University of London)29/05/2026, 15:00
British popular culture plays a key role in shaping how terrorism is imagined and made visible within everyday life. Amid concerns over national cohesion and extremism, Muslim women have emerged as symbolic figures within British cultural discourse. Often framed as a ‘foreign’ Other, they appear within televisual narratives as oppressed figures in need of emancipation or as subjects of...
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Putri Kristimanta (Department of Politics, The University of Manchester)29/05/2026, 16:00
This presentation examines the intensifying regime of state terrorism in West Papua under Indonesian rule, not simply as counter-insurgency but as a sustained assault on Indigenous Papuans and their environment. It argues that violence in Papua is not limited to isolated abuses, but forms part of an ongoing and cumulative regime of destruction operating through extrajudicial killings, torture,...
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Nazanin Shahbazi (University of Manchester)29/05/2026, 16:00
This work develops a Lacanian account of structural violence as the foundational operation through which political order is constituted. Rather than treating structural violence as an effect of inequality, symbolic domination or ideological mystification, it locates violence in the act of disavowal by which a political formation establishes itself as an order. Structural violence is defined as...
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Kat Osborne (Royal Holloway, University of London)29/05/2026, 16:15
Prevent is gendered to the core, with the absence of gender in policy incompatible with the reality of practice. Whilst gender has been minimally addressed in counterterrorism policing research, it has been largely limited to viewing Prevent as a feminised policy (Schmidt, 2022; Bahadur Lamb, 2014). Prevent practitioners are central to the implementation of counterterrorism yet required to use...
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Katarina Kemp (University of Manchester)29/05/2026, 16:15
This paper analyses how slow violence (ecocide, urbicide and the use of White Phosphorus), is framed by the media. The NGOisation of humanitarian aid and conflict, structurally results in media strategies that prioritise visible and emotionally shocking violence. This paper argues that slow violence is structurally misrepresented because it lacks the spectacle required by affective media...
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Jana-Christina von Dessien29/05/2026, 16:30
The normalization of US drone strikes in counterterrorism challenges the assumption of an advantage of the actors who defend traditional interpretations of jus ad bellum and IHL norms. This study conceptualizes actor status and governance level of norms as risk factors to the antipreneurial advantage and probes their plausibility in an analysis of framing activities by the ICRC, the ACLU and...
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Caitlin Jordan (Edge Hill University)29/05/2026, 16:30
This paper presents emerging findings from ongoing PhD research examining the effectiveness of the Prevent Strategy in addressing Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, it identifies how Prevent is interpreted in practice, with many practitioners’ prioritising vulnerability, safeguarding and early intervention over a narrow focus on ideology.
Participants...
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