10th Anniversary of STR's Annual Postgraduate Conference: Current Themes in the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence

Session

Counter-Terrorism in Practice: Surveillance, Risk, and Intervention

2A

29 May 2026, 11:00

4.08 (Williamson Building)

15. Prick Us, Do We not Bleed? Latent Risk Profiling of Violent Extremist Social Media Users Based on Online Leakage Behavior

Brant Marcus (University of North Florida)

29/05/2026, 11:00

Paper

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...

14. Policing the Digital Frontier: Rethinking EU Counter-Terrorism in the Age of Online Radicalisation

Shreya Sinha (Dublin City University)

29/05/2026, 11:15

Paper

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...

23. Police Cooperation Against Cross-Border Paramilitaries on the Island of Ireland

Kathryn Cribbin (Queen's University, Belfast)

29/05/2026, 11:30

Paper

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...