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

Friday 29 May 2026, 09:00 → 18:30 Europe/London

University of Manchester

Marcelle Trote Martins (The University of Manchester)

CfP - 2026 PG Conference

CfP - 2026 PG Conference

Welcome Remarks by the Society for Terrorism Research and the University of Manchester

Williamson 4.08

Digital Extremism: Mobilisation, Prediction, and Prevention

1 “I’m Right, Not Far-Right”: Feminine Aesthetics and Pro-British Branding in GenAI Amelia Content

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 digital space, accelerated by the availability of AI applications for both video and image production. Building on a grant-funded project exploring AI-driven harms in far-right and manosphere ecosystems, this research seeks to catalogue how visual signifiers of British nationalism and white femininity are (re)produced within AI-generated Amelia visuals. In analysing 70 images and videos shared by two X accounts in early 2026 (@AmeliaOnSolana and @makeukgood), I highlight how common far-right narratives around nostalgia, white replacement, and anti-immigrant sentiments are visually (re)constructed within AI-generated Amelia content. Additionally, I explore how white femininity and heterosexuality are central to Amelia’s appeal amongst the British far-right, highlighting continuities in output aesthetics across time and platforms. Importantly, these visuals are steeped in implication and ambiguity, expanding radicalisation pathways and opportunities for propaganda production while making removal and response difficult.

Speaker: Allysa Czerwinsky (University of Manchester)

2 Forecasting Extremism Behavioural Change Using AI in Extremist Online Networks

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 risk.

This research explores how attitudes, emotions, and behaviours evolve over time within discussions on Telegram channels - using data science and AI methods to classify and predict these behaviours over time. Extending prior work on large language models for extremist classification, the study incorporates a wider range of behaviours, such as misogyny, mobilisation, nostalgia, and expressions of violence.

The project further explores whether agentic large language model approaches can predict future extremist behavioural trajectories and evaluates their performance against conventional machine learning techniques, including time series models. The aim is to deepen understanding of radicalisation trajectories and approaches for classifying and predicting extremism online.

Speaker: James Stevenson (University of Bristol)

3 Combatting Online Extremism: The Algorithmic Amplification of Counter-Speech

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 effectiveness of these interventions, due to the challenges of measuring long-term impact. Moreover, these campaigns face ethical challenges such as interfering with users’ personal autonomy and choice, and unintentionally generating reactance, thereby reinforcing extremist beliefs. Despite this, limited research addresses the ethical principles underpinning these campaigns. Part of a collaborative project with Moonshot, this presentation aims to address these gaps by exploring the effectiveness and ethics surrounding the algorithmic amplification of counter-speech as a CVE intervention. A mixed-methods design is adopted, including: semi-structured interviews with CVE professionals; and the analysis of evaluation data on algorithmically amplified counter-speech campaigns. This is important to inform policymakers, practitioners, and tech companies of how to ethically and effectively use algorithms to amplify counter-speech. The presentation will identify where resources and research can address existing challenges. This will aid in combatting online extremism efforts and mitigate against potential negative impacts associated with counter-speech.

Speaker: Ellie Rogers

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

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

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 doctrine of violence, while sceptics contend that incel discourse lacks sufficient ideological consensus to meet definitional thresholds of terrorism, as attacks are merely expressions of individual, disconnected grievance. This paper argues that resolving this debate requires attending to the ideological work performed within incel communities themselves. Drawing on reflexive thematic analysis of discourse from incels.is, it examines how community members frame, justify, and condemn acts of mass violence. The findings suggest that incel discourse oscillates between the register of personal grievance and the articulation of a broader political agenda, resisting any straightforward classification. This tension, the paper argues, bears directly on how incel violence should be understood within terrorism studies, gender-based violence frameworks, and counter terrorism policy.

Speaker: Ms Martina Lucia Zambelli (Malmö University)

5 Ideological Mixing in the Manosphere: A Critical Review of Literature

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 inter-related but non-cohesive anti-feminist communities (Brace et al., 2024). This critical review examines the state of research on the manosphere’s ideological landscape, in relation to its implications for understanding ideologically idiosyncratic milieus.
It contends that existing scholarship remains partial and fractured due to three areas of contention: conflicting cross-disciplinary assumptions about ideology; the proliferation of uneven conceptual vocabularies used to characterise these milieus (including assemblages, networked publics, and subcultures); and the fragmentation of empirical research across ideological content, networked diffusion, and individual belief adoption. Collectively, these tensions have produced a critical lacuna, namely understanding of how ideological interpretations are articulated, contested, and rendered authoritative in the manosphere. To address this gap, this review demonstrates the need for further research into the invocation of interpretive frameworks, such as ‘the red pill’, as a social resource through which beliefs, experience, and knowledge claims are invoked, debated, and rendered collectively meaningful in ideologically mixed extremist environments.

Speaker: Annabel Hoare (Anglia Ruskin University)

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

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. Drawing on a non-participatory online ethnography and Kruglanski’s 3N model of radicalisation, the article argues that economic victimhood narratives are crucial in transforming individual grievances into collective resentment and ideological radicalisation.
Posts from German-language incel forums reveal recurring reports of social exclusion and bullying in education and employment. Rising living costs and inflation are interpreted as evidence of man-made systemic injustice, often blamed on the ‘Boomer’ generations or political and economic elites accused of undermining young men’s futures. These narratives construct economic inequality as a generational injustice, reinforcing a shared victim identity.
This perceived economic hopelessness contributes to protest promotion such as “Citizen’s benefit-Maxxing” and “No Pussy, No Work”, which encourage withdrawal from labour as a form of resistance. By focusing on the political economy of sexual disadvantage, the article offers a new perspective on the ideological foundations of the incel movement and its links to broader extremist discourses.

Speaker: Jana Roth

Coffee & Tea

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

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

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 genuine threats. Using a sample of over 200,000 social media posts (on the X platform) as a foundation, we analyze posts from three subgroups of January 6th capitol rioters (Passive, Active, and Violent: those arrested for violent action on Jan 6th). The analysis explores latent language differences in how subgroups within a single ideological movement communicate and interact with social media, all with the intention to identify predictors of violent action. The exploration of rhetorical and behavioral features within subgroups will be conducted using unsupervised machine learning methods, including Structural Topic Modeling (STM), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and Correlated Topic Modeling (CTM). Alongside the latent features identified by this exploration, we will use predictors modeled after the radicalization signals described in 3N theory, Significance Quest theory, and Identity Fusion to perform a supervised prediction of subgroup membership on a user-by-user basis.

Speaker: Brant Marcus (University of North Florida)

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

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 online radicalisation, while critically interrogating whether frameworks designed for offline counter-terrorism remain adequate in addressing digitally mediated threats.
The analysis highlights the role of social media, encrypted messaging services, as well as emerging ecosystems such as online gaming platforms in facilitating the spread of extremist ideologies. While the EU has developed an increasingly robust regulatory architecture, including the Regulation on Preventing the Dissemination of Terrorist Content Online (TERREG), the Digital Services Act, and the AI Act, this paper examines the growing reliance on artificial intelligence in content moderation, assessing the associated risks such as algorithmic bias and profiling. The paper argues that while the EU has adapted its counter-terrorism enforcement to the digital frontier, significant gaps remain, raising questions about the effectiveness of extending offline frameworks to online contexts. The paper also highlights the structural dilemma between security imperatives and fundamental rights in the EU’s governance of digital extremism.

Speaker: Shreya Sinha (Dublin City University)

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

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 the Republic of Ireland. As a result of this, countering the threat caused by these proscribed organisations, cooperation between the police in Northern Ireland (the Royal Ulster Constabulary) and in the Republic of Ireland, An Garda Síochána, was looked at as essential for ending the conflict and defeating republican paramilitaries. This paper will explore the informal cooperation and personal relationships between the two police services and the impact that it had on the threat caused by the aforementioned paramilitaries. Based on archives and interviews with retired police officers, it will be argued that informal cooperation filled the gap left by a lack of consistent formal cooperation against cross-border paramilitaries.

Speaker: Kathryn Cribbin (Queen's University, Belfast)

Security Responses to Political Violence: Cooperation, Strategy, and Public Impact

10 Reassurance or Reminder: the impact of protective security measures on the public

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, 2011).

Music events employ a variety of protective security measures to deter and detect unwanted or unacceptable behaviour. The recent introduction of the Terrorism (POP) Act adds specific consideration and risk mitigation of terrorist-motivated attacks and disruption to event organiser’s responsibilities, which has garnered some concern about increase of costs and limited national availability of barriers. There is a clear financial benefit associated with attendees feeling safe within events, but little research into how this can be maximised.

My paper discusses some of the findings from my recent examination of safety and security at English music events., in particular the impact that common counter-terror measures have on feelings of safety.

Speaker: KT Sonnen (Coventry University)

11 The Standardization Trap: Doctrinal Rigidity and Strategic Failure in Contemporary Counter-Terrorism

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 doctrines in asymmetric conflicts, the research argues that the obsession with standardized counter-terrorism has created a dangerous disconnect from reality. This rigidity, which elevates specific high-tech tactics to universal models, renders security architectures critically vulnerable to strategies of attrition and saturation.

This trap is rooted in a profound misconception of the threat, where the return of "mass" and "logistics of exhaustion" are ignored in favor of high-cost, low-volume technological solutions. In urban environments, this produces a false sense of security; standardized protocols do not build resilience, but rather provide adversaries with a legible blueprint for evasion.

Ultimately, the research posits that true resilience requires a radical departure from the dogmas of the last thirty years. Only by abandoning the "Standardization Trap" can security apparatuses replace tactical inertia with the doctrinal flexibility needed to address the inherent unpredictability of contemporary asymmetric warfare.

Speaker: Chiara Caterina Gatti

12 Operation Banner from a new perspective: Understanding the Human Cost of Counterinsurgency

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 the individual experiences of veterans through oral history interviews.

The main objective of this paper is to discuss and explore how oral history can be used to investigate the neglected history of the individual experiences of British veterans who served in Operation Banner. As outlined, recent historical literature on the Troubles has failed to include these important testimonies and has therefore created a significant gap in the studies of Operation Banner, counterterrorism and memory studies. The paper, therefore, argues that oral history is an invaluable tool for addressing this gap in the literature.

By studying the individual veteran experiences of the conflict from this new and important perspective that has been previously underutilised, we can look to better understand the actual lived experiences of these veterans.

Speaker: Andrew Lawler (University of Liverpool)

Lunch

Keynote Speech

Media, Culture, and the Politics of Radicalisation

13 From Views to Violence? Islamist Narratives on TikTok

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 their narratives more accessible, interesting and fun to a younger audience that they might not reach on other platforms. Moreover, they exploit (perceived) grievances and reframe current events to create emotionalised narratives provoking strong reactions by their audiences. Most of the content is posted by individuals without direct links to terrorist organisations. To circumvent content moderation, they address seemingly harmless, everyday topics, for example explaining if it is allowed for Muslims to listen to music or celebrate their birthdays. This makes it difficult to differentiate between general information about Islam and extremist content. The presentation highlights how Islamists on TikTok conceal their identity and create content that viewers identify with, which facilitates their radicalisation. Additionally, it will present examples of approaches to counter Islamism and prevent radicalisation on TikTok by utilising authentic content, alternative narratives and redirection.

Speaker: Lea Brost

14 Music and the Countering of Radicalization during the ISIS Offensive in Iraq (2014–2017)

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 suppression of everyday cultural practices. This paper focuses on the anti-ISIS propaganda music in Iraq and examines how this music, through its creative and unprecedented characteristics, functioned as a creative strategy of anti-extremist dissemination. Unlike typical wartime propaganda music in the region, anti-ISIS music (e.g., Yamma Ali, by Shams al-Maslawe) featured a female voice, dance-inducing rhythm, vibrant acoustic design, and Iraqi traditional practices at its core. Through audiovisual analysis of these music tracks, I will argue that the aforementioned features, beyond increasing media viability, were deployed to represent the picture of a modern, united, culturally rich, and festive Iraq, as opposed to ISIS’s extremist project. I combine my analysis with insights from Terror Management Theory to expand on the understanding of cultural practices as crucial actors in the processes of deradicalization and resilience under terrorism.

Speaker: Hannaneh Akbarpour (Yale University)

15 Visualising Terror: Gendered Representations of Muslim Women in British Television

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 heightened suspicion. These representations do not simply reflect security concerns but actively structure how terrorism is visualised.
Television dramas such as Bodyguard (BBC, 2018) and Honour (ITV, 2020) serve as sites through which the visual politics of terrorism are produced. Through narrative, characterisation, and visual cues, these programmes construct Muslim women through gendered logics of threat recognition, reproducing Orientalist binaries in which Muslim women are either those who must be saved or those from whom the nation must be protected.
These gendered visual framings are central to the construction of a ‘suspect community’ (Pantazis & Pemberton, 2009). By centering gendered visual tropes in British popular culture, this paper contributes to critical terrorism studies by exposing how imaginaries of threat and belonging are racialised, gendered, and embedded in the symbolic economy of national identity.

Speaker: Ruby Bashir (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Narratives, Affect, and Extremist Subjectivities

16 Imagined Extremist Communities: The Paradox of the Community-Driven Lone-Actor Terrorist

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 conventionally expressed in existing research. Although lone actors are not subject to an external command like group-based actors are, the imagined extremist community functions as a “group” for lone actors and is, for all practical purposes, a corresponding alternative to a terror cell. During the radicalisation process, these individuals seek and turn to the imagined extremist community, enabling them to form a sense of belonging and identification and underscoring that these actors, although conventionally labelled as “lone,” are immersed in an alternative culture that nurtures their ideas and sustains their extremist ideology. This becomes particularly evident through their cognitive radicalisation, a process amplified by their psychological predispositions. The concept of the imagined extremist community elucidates how lone actors, especially those embracing right-wing ideologies, are subject to radical influences. Their conservative traits and psychological dispositions make them particularly receptive to the appeal of such communities.

Speaker: Inger Isabella Storm Sandboe (University of Oxford)

17 Right After the Cut: Subjectivity and the Real in Iran’s 2025–2026 Uprising

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, information blackouts, and constraints on mourning, arguing that the uprising and massacre form a continuous process rather than discrete events. The analysis traces how participants experience the massacre as a world‑reorienting Event that reorganises embodiment, temporality, and sociality, and how they struggle to name and quantify the violence through maximal signifiers, death counts, and haunting images of shrouded bodies and killed children. It identifies emergent ethical and identificatory formations, guarding the dead’s “legacy,” refusing symbolic impunity, and reconfiguring Iranian‑ness away from shame toward sacrifice, courage, and a long, sometimes mythic, horizon of equal rights.

Speaker: Nazanin Shahbazi (University of Manchester)

18 Extremist narratives as mechanisms of emotion construction

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 and necessary. By integrating insights from criminology, narrative studies, terrorism studies, and Barrett's theory of constructed emotion, we argue that narratives do not simply trigger emotions - they help construct them.

We conceptualise extremist narratives as stories that structure which emotions are available or felt to be legitimate in a given context. In doing so, they also shape which (re)actions are deemed appropriate. We develop this argument through two mechanisms central to understanding violent extremism: neutralisation and de-pluralisation. Neutralisation helps explain how narratives can reorganise emotional responses in ways that make violence feel morally permissible. De-pluralisation shows how narratives progressively narrow alternative interpretations and emotional responses, making violence appear necessary. By reconceptualising extremist narratives as mechanisms of emotion construction rather than emotional triggering, this paper contributes to debates on terrorism and emotions and offers a new framework for understanding how narratives facilitate extremist violence.

Speaker: Katrien Vanlerberghe (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Coffee & Tea

Gender, Counter-Terrorism, and Structural Violence

19 This-Order: L’Étourdit and Structural Violence

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 the cut, exclusion and torsion required for a configuration to appear coherent and self grounding. Drawing on Lacan’s four logical moments in L’Étourdit—the gap between saying and hearing, the logic of the Not All, topological torsion and the impossibility of a fully writable relation—the article conceptualises dis order as the gaps and impossibilities every order must repress, and this order as the contingent arrangement that emerges from that repression. Violence is thus not an event that breaks a prior harmony but the Real of the political: the structural operation that binds inside to outside, universality to exception and enunciation to what cannot be said.

Speaker: Nazanin Shahbazi (University of Manchester)

20 Gendering Prevent: Gendered Constructions in Prevent Policy and Policing

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 discretion and structured professional judgement to operate in the pre-criminal space. As practitioners often operate with rationalities and traditions that are not fixed by institutional rules, research is needed on how these gendered perspectives shape the policing and implementation of Prevent policy. Therefore, this research explores the intersectional gendered dimensions of risk and vulnerability with a focus on how policy impacts the policing of Prevent from the perspective of Prevent practitioners. Using a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Prevent policy and practitioner interviews, this research proposes the use of gender as a critical framework for researching counterterrorism. Exploring the realities of feminist methodologies in practitioner-centred research, this paper examines power and decision-making through a gendered lens to explore the gendered constructions of Muslim women in Prevent policy and policing.

Speaker: Kat Osborne (Royal Holloway, University of London)

21 “It’s Not About Ideology”: Emerging Findings on Prevent Practice and Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism

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 consistently emphasised that individuals are often better understood through unmet needs, mental health and social conditions, rather than fixed ideological commitments. In this context, ideology was frequently described as secondary, fluid, or something that “follows” from underlying vulnerabilities. Several practitioners also noted that individuals may move between or combine ideologies, complicating attempts to define cases through a single ideological lens.

Data suggests that, in practice, Prevent is already operating beyond a strictly ideology-based model, including engagement with individuals who do not fit conventional definitions of terrorism. However, this shift raises new challenges. Broadening the scope of Prevent risks overwhelming resource-constrained systems. At the same time, this practice-based approach sits uneasily alongside Prevent’s position within a counter-terrorism framework, where ideology remains central.

This paper argues that this creates a disconnect between policy and practice, requiring practitioners to navigate ongoing ambiguity and raising questions about the coherence and future direction of Prevent.

Speaker: Caitlin Jordan (Edge Hill University)

State Terror and Political Violence: Visibility, Resistance, and Contestation

22 State Terror in West Papua: Slow-Motion Genocide, Ecocide, Ethnocide, and the Politics of Invisibility

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, arbitrary detention, forced displacement, racialised repression, ecocide, ethnocide, and the restriction of independent scrutiny.

The presentation develops this argument through three connected dimensions. First, it highlights the continuing role of the Indonesian military and security apparatus in producing fear and insecurity through direct violence and impunity. Second, it shows how state terror also works through the destruction of the ecological and cultural conditions of Indigenous survival, making ecocide and ethnocide integral to a wider process of slow-motion genocide rather than separate from militarised repression. Third, it examines the politics of invisibility through which Indonesia restricts access for foreign journalists, researchers, and UN monitors, limiting investigation and enabling impunity.

Finally, it connects Papua to Indonesia’s broader trajectory through the March 2026 acid attack on Andrie Yunus, suggesting that coercive methods long normalised in Papua are increasingly visible in national political life.

Speaker: Putri Kristimanta (Department of Politics, The University of Manchester)

23 How to make slow violence visible

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 logics. The media narratives determine what suffering is recognised. By using Critical Mapping technologies to visualise spatial information, hidden forms of violence become visible and can be communicated, challenging the map as an object of unbiased evidence and power. In addition, Affective visual politics examine how images produce political responses. I will use theories of affective bodily resonance, particularly the effect of human and non-human bodies meeting to make slow violence more perceptible. These visual techniques will help bridge the apathy gap between viewer and image. I will be using the case studies of the Beirut Urban Labs (2020) Critical Mapping department and the Lebanon Pavilion (2025) at the Biennale Architettura. This paper aims to reframe how slow violence is communicated and visualised. It will show how alternative visual practices can make it politically visible beyond the spectacle that dominates the media.

Speaker: Katarina Kemp (University of Manchester)

24 Contesting Drone Warfare in Counterterrorism as a Non-State Actor: the Alignment Model on Offsetting Risks to the Antipreneurial Advantage

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 HRW – identifying how they accounted for these risks through strategic elements of disagreement and rhetorical tactics. Findings suggest that the level of risk to an actor’s advantage depends on three factors aligning: 1) their access to institutional and epistemic authority, 2) institutional default and status quo bias toward the norm in question, and 3) how much interpretive elasticity they allow through either setting hard boundaries, category policing, teleological anchoring, or slippery slope projections in their disagreement. While it requires further testing, the proposed alignment model contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the antipreneurial advantage and helps extending the analytical lense to non-state actors’ antipreneurial behavior. Its implications are strategically relevant to non-state practitioners advocating for the governance of norm-disruptive weapon technologies in front of an international legal order under attack.

Speaker: Jana-Christina von Dessien

Closing Remarks

Williamson 4.08