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

Session

The Manosphere and Incel Extremism: Identity, Grievance, and Violence

1B

29 May 2026, 09:30

4.07 (Williamson Building)

37. Understanding Incel Violence as a Terrorist Threat: Between Personal Grievance and Political Ideology

Ms Martina Lucia Zambelli (Malmö University)

29/05/2026, 09:30

Paper

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...

33. Ideological Mixing in the Manosphere: A Critical Review of Literature

Annabel Hoare (Anglia Ruskin University)

29/05/2026, 09:45

Paper

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...

29. Left Behind” as a Collective Identity: Constructions of Economic Victimhood in the Incel Community

Jana Roth

29/05/2026, 10:00

Paper

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....