White feminism and the governance of violent extremism
Initiatives to prevent and counter “violent extremism” (P/CVE) are often highly individualised and individualising, and function to reinforce negative racialised and gendered stereotypes. Recently, some feminist and other critical scholars have argued that sexist and misogynistic beliefs are int...
How Lebanon’s security sector works amidst state collapse
This paper examines how hybrid security orders in Lebanon were renegotiated during shocks, specifically the state collapse from 2019 to 2023 and the regional war in 2023–2024. It employs the framework of Areas of Limited Statehood to analyse the coexistence of formal and informal governance ami...
Believing and belonging? Religious salience and politicality of young Bosnian Muslims in the time of Islamophobia
After fleeing war-torn Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Muslim diaspora quickly developed institutions of sociability and solidarity in ‘the West.’ Although they align with a moderate and secular Islam, the generation born after the war endures a climate of hate and hosti lity. This study investigates...
Silent Sympathy: News Attention, Subtle Support for Far-Right Extremism, and Negative Attitudes Toward Muslims
Right-wing terrorist (RWT) incidents targeting Muslims have become more frequent and news reporting about these incidents can trigger a variety of cognitions and behaviors in audiences. While some studies report more tolerance and openness in response to RWT, hate crimes against minorities can incre...
How terrorist attacks distort public debates: a comparative study of right-wing and Islamist extremism
Previous research has shown how terrorist attacks attract media attention and influence public opinion and decision-makers. However, we lack a comparative assessment of the extent to which extremist ideologies matter and how they matter. Therefore, this paper compares mass media debates over extreme...
Religious Citizenship and Islamophobia
The attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris on January 7, 2015, brought to the fore, yet again, the place of Islam in Western secular democracies and the questioning of Muslim citizenship. The hyper mediatization of jihadist terrorism and its subsequent conflation with Muslim communities in general has ...
How Lebanon’s security sector works amidst state collapse
This paper examines how hybrid security orders in Lebanon were renegotiated during shocks, specifically the state collapse from 2019 to 2023 and the regional war in 2023–2024. It employs the framework of Areas of Limited Statehood to analyse the coexistence of formal and informal governance am...
White supremacy and the racial logic of the global preventing and countering violent extremism agenda
This article analyses what the disavowal of abject forms of white supremacy reveals about the racial logic of the global preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) agenda. We argue that the global P/CVE agenda is built on racialised concepts such as prevention, radicalisation and community ...
Race, Islamophobia and the politics of citizenship in post-unification Germany
Intheimmediate aftermath of German reunification, as in the wake of the recent humanitarian crisis, Germany experienced notable ‘peaks’ of racist agitation and violence. In the 1990s, as today, the post-Communist eastern regions of Germany tend to be perceived as the hub of such racism. In th...
Working with religion in social work: lessons from prevention of violent extremism
In recent years, violent extremism has brought religion to the forefront of social work practice, challenging professionals to engage with religious clients, particularly Islamic clients, more profoundly. This article explores how practitioners who work to prevent violent extremism and radicalizatio...
Countering or contributing to radicalisation and violent extremism in Kenya? A critical case study
In this article, I argue that the “theological and social-psychological radicalisation model”, which has been primarily used in a Western context, has influenced the strategies used by the Kenyan govern ment to explain and combat radicalisation and terrorism. The model predominantly focuses o...
Implications of perceived tenure security and property rights protection in Burkina Faso
the study examines perceived tenure security in Burkina Faso, focusing on socio-cultural factors, authority relations, state politics, and gender dynamics. it identifies challenges in tenure security despite legal reforms, emphasising the subjective nature of tenure security and its dependence o...
A systematic integrative review of countermessaging communication campaigns targeting terrorism or violent extremism
In response to the rise of the so-called Islamic State and its effective use of propaganda to recruit and radicalise followers, countering the communication strategies of a range of terrorist and violent extremist actors has become a significant challenge for policymakers and practitioners. Over the...
From terrorist to victim: Western hegemony, Islamophobia, and the 2022 uprising in Iran
This paper critiques dominant postcolonial approaches to Islamophobia, arguing that their emphasis on Muslim victimhood, although intended to empower, inadvertently reinforces Western hegemony by sustaining a dualistic framework of West versus Islam. We define Islamophobia as any ideology, re...
Gendered Extremism in the Pacific on 4chan: A Mixed-methods Exploration of Australian and New Zealanders’ Concepts of Women, Gender, and Sexual Violence on /Pol/
The association between 4chan and online extremist subcultures has seen increasing academic scrutiny—particularly following the 2019 Christchurch attack by a right-wing terrorist who frequented the anonymous forums. Gender-based extremism features as one (of many) critical subcultures that command...
Community, More than Conviction: Understanding Radicalisation Factors for Young People in Australia
The radicalisation of young people has been a noted challenge in security discourse. This study sought to better understand the radical isation of young Australians. We suggest that the engagement of young Australians with violent extremism can be understood through ideological entitativity, in w...
Intersectional activism: Dutch-Turkish Muslim women “talking back” to securitization and Islamophobia
This article investigates the efforts of influential Turkish Muslim civil society actors to amplify the voices of Muslim women in the Netherlands. Through interviews, the research uncovers the impacts of Islamophobia and securitization policies on the classification of Muslim women as either thre...
Decolonising Islamophobia
The predominant conception of Islamophobia defines it as anti-Muslim racism. The consequence of this rather narrow characterisation is that Islamophobia is treated as a Western conundrum—that is, as a form of racism in Western societies—that affects Muslim immigrants from non-Western—Arab, Asi...
Sino-Indian Security Predicaments for the Twenty First Century
This article considers various security predicaments affecting relations between India and China. These Sino-Indian security predicaments include their territorial dispute, their nuclear arms race, their encirclement and alignment scenarios, their trade and energy issues, and their future prospec...
Unveiling Islamophobia: navigating its presence in Sweden
Political and media narratives often manufacture immigration as a social problem, framing the construction of meaning through the discourses of cultural differences as social, political and security problems. of specific concern is how Muslims and immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries ar...
Islamophobia among Muslims in Indonesia
Islamophobia has its long historical roots. Nonetheless, religiously motivated terrorism and the use of the name “Islam” by terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State (IS) may have amplified Islamophobia. Islamophobia has caused violence against Muslims in several stages and contexts. Thi...
Who speaks for the European border security industry? A network analysis
This article contributes to the literature on the European border security industry with a network analysis of a new bipartite data set. The network is composed of speakers and their speech topics at a European border security conference taking place from 2008 to 2015. Speakers are linked to co...
Strain theory, resilience, and far-right extremism: the impact of gender, life experiences and the internet
There has been a notable increase in support for far-right ideologies across the West. The seriousness of this threat has been acknowledged by the UK government which has banned certain far-right groups using terrorism legislation. While criminological theories have been useful in explaining general...
“We are already 1-0 behind”: Perceptions of Dutch Muslims on Islamophobia, securitisation, and deradicalisation
This article presents the findings of an explanatory study into the perceptions of Dutch Muslims in The Hague concerning preemptive counter-extremism and de-radicalisation policies. Based on 15 in-depth interviews with established Muslim community figures and a theoretical survey of 102 respondents ...
Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the Netherlands: concepts, developments, and backdrops
In recent years, the Netherlands has been frequently confronted with public incidents of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. After defining the complex concepts of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, presenting the theoretical approach to these phenomena, and sketching the societal context in which they are...
Defining and Illustrating “Extremism” Using the Largest Investigation into Islam in Prison
ABSTRACT In the context of a damaging absence of clarity, we define “Islamist Extremism” as: the absolutely divided and antagonistic Worldview of the “Us”-true-Muslim “in-group” who must strive to live in an “Islamic” State versus “Them”-non-Muslim’ and “wrong”-Muslim “ou...
“If we want to have a good future, we need to do something about it”. Youth, security and imagined horizons in the intercultural Arctic Norway
Security is an issue often raised when discussing the Arctic, a region where international relations and tensions between the great powers of the past and present often are taken-for-granted as the traditional scope of dialog. We have chosen to focus on youth in Arctic Norway, their perceived ...
Terrorism and Security at the Olympics: Empirical Trends and Evolving Research Agendas
This paper examines the intersections of terrorism, security and the Olympics. An empirical analysis of Olympic-related terrorism in the period 1968–2014 suggests the need to bring state terrorism into the analysis of terrorism at the Olympics. The empirical data presented in this study under...
Counterinsurgency, community participation, and the preventing and countering violent extremism agenda in Kenya
Over the last six years, the P/CVE agenda has emphasized the need of preventative measures to augment kinetic counterterrorism security approaches. Based on field research in Kenya in 2019, this article analyzes the ‘police power’ of P/CVE, which compels populations to participate in their own s...
How security shaped Libya’s transition
The divergent transition trajectories on which some countries in the MENA region embarked after the 2011 uprisings sparked extensive scholarly attention. While the state remained largely intact in Egypt or Tunisia, the violent revolt in Libya led to civil conflicts and the collapse of governmen...
Threatened Globally, Acting Locally: Modeling Law Enforcement Homeland Security Practices
The present study examined the effects of institutional pressures on homeland security preparedness among law enforcement agencies in Illinois. The data come from the Illinois Homeland Security Survey (IHSS). Specifically, the study employed three theories to explain homeland security preparedne...
Constructing the ‘good Muslim girl’: hegemonic and pariah femininities in the British Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) agenda
Since the rise of Islamic State (IS) in 2014, British Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) policy, Prevent, has increasingly focused on the appeal of jihadist ideology to Muslim girls. This article considers the case of the Bethnal Green girls, who migrated to IS territory in February 2015. Using the ...
The Role of Small States in Promoting International Security: The Case of Mongolia
Multilateralism and preventive diplomacy are essential in produc tively addressing common interests and challenges, including issues related to nuclear security. Although the world knows about the successful negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal and the fate of the six-party talks to denucleariz...
The Role of Small States in Promoting International Security: The Case of Mongolia
Multilateralism and preventive diplomacy are essential in produc tively addressing common interests and challenges, including issues related to nuclear security. Although the world knows about the successful negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal and the fate of the six-party talks to denucleariz...
A genealogy of Islamophobia in a global critical race framework: religion, whiteness, and controlling rationality
Contemporary Islamophobia, while pervasive in the West, has now escalated in societies as distinct as China, India, Myanmar, and Israel in the post-9/11 era. Yet, Islamophobia is not something new, with roots from the centuries after Islam’s founding. This study argues that a global-historical fra...
Perceptions of Far-Right Extremist Violence as Terrorism: Exploring Influences on Public Perception in the United Kingdom
This article presents the results of an empirical inquiry into the complex dynamics of public perception of Far-Right Extremism (FRE). The instrument of data collection was an online questionnaire which produced a rich dataset comprising both quantitative and qualitative data. This study investigate...
The new mobilities paradigm and critical security studies: exploring common ground
The rapid expansion of academic research on mobilities is evident in disciplines such as geography, sociology, per formance studies, media studies, history, and literary studies, but how inter- or multi-disciplinary are the research programs, questions, and dialogues being explored? Are scholars f...
Libya; uprising; transition; security; uncertainty
In the context of increasing interest in the relationship between digital communications and authoritarian politics, this paper considers the criminalisation of online dissent in Tanzania. Based on interviews with police officers, local government officials and mobile phone users, the paper ex...
Whole-of-society approach or manufacturing intelligence? Making sense of state-CSO relation in preventing and countering violent extremism in Nigeria
The boundaries of partnership between states and civil society organisations (CSOs), as well as who is counted and who gets to set them, have been the subject of ongoing debate. This discussion has gained particular significance in light of the growing securitisation and tactical engagement of CSOs ...
Regional Cooperation in West Africa: Counter Terrorism and Counter-Insurgency
The challenges of terrorism and insurgency have continued to attract regional response. A significant aspect of such response is the demonstration of shared responsibilities by various nation states in regional cooperation to stamp out the menace of terrorism. The EU member states for instance a...
Anti-Muslim tribalism: a new framework for analysing Islamophobia in contemporary times
One of the leading interpretations of Islamophobia in Europe is antiMuslim racism. Scholars who conceptualize Islamophobia as a form of racism typically draw on the theoretical framework of cultural racism to contend that Muslims in Europe are discriminated against not only on the basis of religion ...
On the scarcity and promise of survey-based studies of international relations and security affairs in the Middle East
Despite a dramatic increase in the availability and quality of public opinion data from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since the Arab uprisings of 2011, the use of surveys to study international relations and security affairs in the region remains notably rare. One likely reason for the ...
Engaging with Online Extremist Material: Experimental Evidence
Despite calls from governments to clamp down on violent extremist material in the online sphere, in the name of preventing radicalisation and therefore terrorism research investigating how people engage with extremist material online is surprisingly scarce. The current paper addresses this gap in kn...
Countering the Islamic State in the Lake Chad Basin: A case for a security-development governance nexus?
The Islamic State in the West African province (ISWAP) has gained prominence in Lake Chad Basin by filling in the security, service delivery, and governance gaps in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger. This has won the group recruits and support in some communities, entrenching it in the region. Using t...
Twenty Years of Externally Promoted Security Assistance in Iraq: Changing Approaches and Their Limits
Iraq adds to the poor track record of externally promoted security assistance in conflict-affected and fragile contexts. By taking a long-term perspective, this article examines and problematizes the shift in paradigms from Security Sector Reforms (SSR) as a pillar of the liberal statebuilding i...
Turkey’s security role in the Gulf region: exploring the case of a newcomer
This study explores Turkey as a newcomer to Gulf security. It addresses why Turkish decision-makers want Turkey to play an elevated security role in the Gulf. It offers a holistic yet detailed outlook of Turkey’s potential enhanced security role and develops a systematic argument that assesse...
Deferring substance: EU policy and the information threat
The article describes EU cross-sectoral policy work on online information threats, focusing on the intersection between values and 'referent objects'. Examining discussions on strategic communication, censorship, media literacy and media pluralism, two value-perspectives were identi f ...
Still agreeing to disagree: international security and constructive ambiguity
This article– which updates and builds on an earlier piece published in Global Governance in 2004– concerns the deliberate use of redundancies, contradictions, imprecisions and other ambiguities in UN Security Council resolutions on the use of force, centrally including Resolution 1441 on I...
Indo-Chinese Cooperation for Gulf Security
Gulf-Asia ties are no longer restricted to just economic, political and cultural ties. There is noticeable intent of collaboration in the security realm as well. Theslow but certain American disengagement from the Middle East has not only affected Gulf security, but could also impact the “free ...
Conflicting securities: contributions to a critical research agenda on climate security
Climate change is increasingly presented as a security issue; this ‘climate security’ discourse arguably imparts an even greater sense of urgency to the already alarming climate crisis. This article argues that the grounding for this narrative is thin, while its adoption in powerful avenues...
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