by Gilbert K. Chesterton.

In Heretics, the young and exuberant Gilbert K. Chesterton takes aim at the ruling ideas of the modern world with unmatched wit, clarity, and theatrical flair. First published in 1905, this explosive collection of essays dissects the fashionable philosophies and celebrated thinkers of the Edwardian era—from the cool determinism of H. G. Wells to the austere moralism of G. B. Shaw—with a mixture of sharp criticism, generous humor, and a deep belief in the necessity of conviction.

Chesterton’s “heretics” are the men and women who shape public opinion yet shy away from defining what they truly believe. Against the drift of vague optimism and breezy skepticism, he argues for the courage to declare, defend, and live by coherent principles. More than a century later, his challenge feels startlingly contemporary. In an age saturated with opinions but thin on first principles, Heretics speaks with renewed urgency and delight.

Vigorous, provocative, and endlessly quotable, Heretics remains one of Chesterton’s most engaging works—an invitation to think boldly, question fashion, and reclaim the intellectual adventure of believing in something definite. Whether read as cultural critique, literary performance, or philosophical provocation, it is a book that still has the power to unsettle, inspire, and illuminate.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. 174p.

Edited by Ray Perrault and Jack Clark

From the co-directors:

Although global private investment in AI decreased for the second consecutive year, investment in generative AI skyrocketed. More Fortune 500 earnings calls mentioned AI than ever before, and new studies show that AI tangibly boosts worker productivity. On the policymaking front, global mentions of AI in legislative proceedings have never been higher. U.S. regulators passed more AI-related regulations in 2023 than ever before. Still, many expressed concerns about AI’s ability to generate deepfakes and impact elections. The public became more aware of AI, and studies suggest that they responded with nervousness.

Stanford University Human Centered Artificial Intelligence. 2024. 502p.

Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South

By Kylie M. Smith

There is a complicated history of racism and psychiatric healthcare in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The asylums of the Jim Crow era employed African American men and women; served as places of treatment and care for African Americans with psychiatric illnesses; and, inevitably, were places of social control. Black people who lived and worked in these facilities needed to negotiate complex relationships of racism with their own notions of community, mental health, and healing. Kylie M. Smith mixes exhaustive archival research, interviews, and policy analysis to offer a comprehensive look at how racism affected Black Southerners with mental illness during the Jim Crow era. Complicated legal, political, and medical changes in the late twentieth century turned mental health services into a battlefield between political ideology and psychiatric treatment approaches, with the fallout having long-term consequences for patient outcomes. Smith argues that patterns of racially motivated abuse and neglect of mentally ill African Americans took shape during this era and continue to the present day. As the mentally ill become increasingly incarcerated,Jim Crow in the Asylum reminds readers that, for many Black Southerners, having a mental illness was and still tantamount to committing a crime.

By Suleyman Ozeren,  Suat Cubukcu,  Gokhan Aksu

The article explores how ISIS sustained its operational presence through a strategic blend of face-to-face and online recruitment, including prison radicalization, social media outreach, and the exploitation of local grievances. It highlights how ISIS adapted to territorial losses, with a focus on its expansion into new regions, particularly in Africa, through affiliates such as Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), Islamic State-Central Africa Province (ISCAP), ISIS-Mozambique, and ISIS in the Greater Sahara. 

Small Wars Journal, 2025

By Peter Grant

While so much of international migration policy appears to be characterised by the normalisation of increasingly abusive practices, it is, nevertheless, also true that an array of activists, humanitarian workers, journalists, lawyers, politicians and local residents continue to offer positive examples of inclusion, protection and support towards people on the move. These actions offer a powerful rejoinder to the narratives espoused all too often around migration and demonstrate that a different way is possible – and that, contrary to widespread perceptions, there is an appetite among host communities as well as policymakers for sustainable and humane solutions. 

Mixed Migration Review, 2025. 6p.

By Peter Grant

Over successive volumes of the Mixed Migration Review, a depressing pattern has emerged: a migration-related action or policy that inspires outrage or condemnation today may, in the space of just a year or two, become accepted practice. This phenomenon of “normalising the extreme” means that some of the most egregious acts and policies documented this year, far from being disturbing anomalies, may instead serve as a tideline for what may soon be regarded as unremarkable or mainstream. Bearing that in mind, the incidents documented in this section – while reprehensible in themselves – also offer a wider warning of worse to come.

Mixed Migration Review, 2024.. 10p.

By Yasmine Wong and Antara Chakraborthy

SYNOPSIS
The recent case of a 14-year-old male Singaporean radicalised through extremist content illustrates the dangers of how seemingly benign communities and platform algorithms are pipelines for radicalisation.

COMMENTARY

A 14-year-old male Singaporean was recently issued with Restriction Orders (RO) under Singapore’s Internal Security Act (ISA) for online self-radicalisation by what has been termed a “salad bar” of extremist ideologies, leading him to support the cause of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and far-right ideologies, such as the incel (aka involuntarily celibate) subculture.

The teenager had started unintentionally by accessing dubious or questionable far-right material posted by foreign extremists, which was recommended to him by platform algorithms after he consumed true crime content. This eventually led him to imbibe content supportive of the far-right and to join communities with violent antisemitic beliefs.

His encounter with incel (a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate”) ideology was similarly unintentional. An incel is a member of an online subculture of mostly male and heterosexual people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner, often blaming or hating women as a result. 

In 2023, after becoming more self-conscious about his appearance, he came across “looksmaxxing” content, a part of the incel subculture that focuses on maximising one’s own physical attractiveness. He started posting and sharing incel content online.

This transition reveals an interesting, albeit insidious, aspect of digital networks – the overlap and blurring of boundaries between extreme and benign communities, creating a pathway from the banal to the extreme. Increasingly, according to Matthew Kriner, managing director of the Accelerationism Research Consortium, “anything and everything is becoming a viable pathway to violence”.

Specifically, “antisocial, decentralised, online networks” are overlapping in ways that “encourage and inspire” young people to commit atrocities and various forms of violence. Amplified by algorithms, these ideologies are often deeply embedded within internet culture, making their extremist tenets difficult to detect.

By Antonia Vaughan

Researchers of risky topics have benefitted from a burgeoning literature on researcher safety, including that specifically focused on researching the far right (Pearson et al. 2023; Pruden 2024; Gelashvili and Gagnon 2024; Sibley 2024). Much of this literature has focused on tackling urgent concerns and providing practical advice, targeting the individual and the institution. Drawing on 21 interviews with researchers of the far right and manosphere, this report complements these efforts by detailing how researcher safety is impacted by environmental factors. Focusing on three key stakeholders – the institution, the manager and the researcher themselves – the report illustrates how individual efforts and interactions between stakeholders have significant implications for safety and underlines the need to situate researchers within the academic context. Arguing that barriers to safety pivot on both what is known about risk and what is possible to mitigate, the report highlights areas to focus on to improve both current and future practice. To examine the impact of stakeholders and how their interactions have an impact on safety, this report proposes a matrix highlighting the varying roles, responsibilities and capabilities of each actor. In doing so, it illustrates the necessity of understanding the researcher within a broader framework rather than focusing on the researcher in isolation. These findings contribute to concerns about the ability of researchers to safeguard themselves, and the importance of environmental factors in affecting the safety of researchers. Although focused on researchers of the far right, the findings are likely applicable to researchers of extremism more broadly, who face similar harms in the same environment.

Activist, Academic, and Artistic Resistance and Intervention

By Faust-Scalisi, Mario (editor); 

Arndt, Susan (editor)

The far right and its fascism are on the rise. Again. The contributors to this volume bring together activist, scholarly, artist and journalist expertise on populism and propaganda, governance and media communication, far-right violence and terrorism. They address resistance strategies of academia and activism as well as NGOs and civil rights movements, by deconstructing far-right strategies of governance or communication and providing counter-argumentations and communication strategies, as well as strategies of political or civic education, empathy or solidarity as modes of intervention. The volume also contextualises the far right, taking historical and cross-spatial dis*continuities into account.

Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2025. 

Converging Paths?

By Daniel G. Reginald

Although both Brazil and the United States inherited European norms that accorded whites privileged status relative to all other racial groups, the development of their societies followed different trajectories in defining white/black relations. In Brazil pervasive miscegenation and the lack of formal legal barriers to racial equality gave the appearance of its being a “racial democracy,” with a ternary system of classifying people into whites (brancos), multiracial individuals (pardos), and blacks (pretos) supporting the idea that social inequality was primarily associated with differences in class and culture rather than race. In the United States, by contrast, a binary system distinguishing blacks from whites by reference to the “one-drop rule” of African descent produced a more rigid racial hierarchy in which both legal and informal barriers operated to create socioeconomic disadvantages for blacks. But in recent decades, Reginald Daniel argues in this comparative study, changes have taken place in both countries that have put them on “converging paths.” Brazil’s black consciousness movement stresses the binary division between brancos and negros to heighten awareness of and mobilize opposition to the real racial discrimination that exists in Brazil, while the multiracial identity movement in the U.S. works to help develop a more fluid sense of racial dynamics that was long felt to be the achievement of Brazil’s ternary system. Against the historical background of race relations in Brazil and the U.S. that he traces in Part I of the book, including a review of earlier challenges to their respective racial orders, Daniel focuses in Part II on analyzing the new racial project on which each country has embarked, with attention to all the political possibilities and dangers they involve.

University Park, PA, Penn State University Pess, 2006

By Adam Baird

Globally, 90% of firearms homicides are committed by men, and men also make up the vast majority of the victims. The highest rates of homicide are mainly found in cities in the Americas (including the Caribbean) and southern Africa, mainly in cities. “Men killing men” disproportionately affects young people in the Global South who live in precarious economic circumstances. This has been the consistent demographic of lethal armed violence for decades.

If men are at the centre of the global armed violence epidemic, it clearly has something to do with their gender. The report explains that when frustrated young men in contexts of persistent poverty gain easy access to small arms and ammunition, it creates a significant risk of an epidemic of lethal violence. This prompts the question: What work is being undertaken with men using a masculinities focus to prevent armed violence? The answer, in short, is none. Efforts to reduce armed violence that do not consider masculinities  will only have a limited effect.

The report suggests that greater debate about this issue is required and that the United Nations can lead progress by developing initiatives in collaboration with Member States, academia and civil society partners. However, to achieve this goal, greater advocacy, political support and funding are vital. 

UNIDIR, Geneva, 2025. 36p.

By National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The number of incidents involving disruptive, threatening, or violent behavior in commercial airports has increased in recent years. However, much of the response to these incidents has been focused on addressing behavior in flight, leaving airport operators with limited guidelines tailored to the airport environment.

ACRP Research Report 280: Reducing and Managing Disruptive and Unruly Behavior in Airports: A Guide, from TRB's Airport Cooperative Research Program, presents a practical guide for reducing and responding to incidents of disruptive, threatening, or violent behavior in an airport setting. The guide examines the topic holistically and offers a structured approach to understanding root causes, prevention and mitigation strategies, coordinated response, and post incident analysis. 

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2025. 100p

Domestic violence against women remains alarmingly widespread in the EU, with Eurostat data showing that one in three of the 228 million women are affected. The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has long championed efforts to combat this abuse, first raising the issue in a 2006 opinion. More recently, it helped shape the EU’s first-ever law to protect women from domestic violence and continues to play an active role in the UN Commission on the Status of Women, reinforcing its global commitment to ending this form of violence.

The first ever EU-wide legislation to fight violence against women and domestic violence.

In 2024, the EU adopted the first ever law to combat violence against women. The EESC directly contributed to this EU directive, which incorporated key provisions of our opinion:

• a comprehensive definition of violence: the directive criminalises various forms of violence against women, such as female genital mutilation and cyber violence, aligning with the EESC’s call for a broad definition;

• adopting an intersectional approach: the directive acknowledges the greater vulnerability of certain groups, including women with disabilities and migrant women, and calls for tailored support measures;

• enhanced support services: the directive provides for specialised support services for victims, in line with the EESC’s emphasis on comprehensive victim support.

In addition, the EU set up the 116 016 EU-wide helpline number for victims of violence against women.

The EU directive not only criminalises various forms of violence, but also provides for the creation of victim support services and mandatory training for law enforcement, along with preventive measures such as awareness campaigns and educational programs. It also ensures cross-border cooperation and protection for victims, with legal procedures that are harmonised across EU Member States.

Member States will have until 14 June 2027 to transpose the directive into their national law and policy.

Strengthening EU measures:

The EESC recently adopted a further opinion, which identifies shortcomings in the directive and seeks to further strengthen EU-wide measures. It calls for:

• a broader definition of violence against women (institutional violence, prostitution, chemical submission, pornography, etc.);

• violence against women to be added to the list of EU crimes;

• comprehensive sexuality education at all stages of education;

• specific focus on women with disabilities and other vulnerable groups.

Taking action on the global stage

The Committee’s participation in the 69th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW) provided an opportunity to reiterate the EESC’s position and recommendations on the issue of equality of women and the fight against gender-based violence. The EESC called for the direct involvement of civil society organisations in shaping national and regional plans to end violence against women. The political declaration adopted at the end of the session reaffirmed the global commitment to gender equality, including the commitment to end gender-based violence.

Looking ahead

The EESC remains committed to combating domestic violence and violence against women in general. It will continue its efforts to have newly emerging forms of violence recognised in the EU, such as ‘sexual digital forgeries’ or ‘deepfakes’. In June 2025, the EESC also adopted a resolution on Supporting the Declaration of principles for a gender-equal society, backing the European Commission’s Roadmap for Women’s Rights. This will guide the Committee’s policy agenda on gender equality in the long term.

  European Economic and Social Committee, 2025. 2p.

By Steven Mello

While survey evidence suggests widespread financial fragility in the U.S., causal evidence on the implications of typical, negative income shocks is scarce. I estimate the impact of speeding fines on household finances using administrative traffic citation records and a panel of credit reports. Event studies reveal that fines averaging $195 are associated with a $34 increase in unpaid bills in collections. Given additional evidence that fine payment explains this effect and that default is the “last resort” for households, I interpret this finding as suggesting rates of inability to meet unplanned expenses which are consistent with the survey evidence. I also find that fines are associated with longer-run declines in credit scores, borrowing limits, and the likelihood of appearing as employed in payroll records covering a subset of large, high-paying employers. This impact on employment situations appears attributable to the diminished financial position of households rather than, e.g., downstream license suspensions.

Unpublished paper; 

By Carina Bruwer 

South Africa’s Succulent Karoo is home to succulent flora that occur nowhere else on earth. But many species are disappearing due to a rapidly escalating onslaught by criminal networks orchestrating the harvesting and trade of rare and threatened species to satisfy international demand for ornamental plants. This report explores the illegal market for South African succulent flora from the Succulent Karoo region, the impact of this market on people and ecosystems, and the implementation of the National Response Strategy to address the crisis  

Key points • Cooperation between State and non-State stakeholders has been integral to the response’s successes. • Despite the illegal succulent market’s transnational nature, the response is concentrated in South Africa. • Seized plants have become unmanageable. • Resource and staff shortages have overwhelmed those responding to the illegal market. • Limited law enforcement capacity and allegations of corruption in the Northern Cape Province have caused the response to be driven primarily by the Western Cape. • Limited government departments are engaged in implementing the National Response Strategy, despite its multiple dimensions 

Contemporary experiences from Jewish congregations and organisations

By The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention

This study focuses on antisemitic hate crime and of insecurity and fear of exposure to such crime as it is experienced by Jewish congregations and organisations in Sweden.

Wide variation in exposure to antisemitic hate crime and harassment

The interviewees’ narratives indicate a wide variation in the degree of exposure to antisemitic incidents during the past five years among the different Jewish institutions that were interviewed. Several interviewees stated that it is unusual for their institutions or premises to be affected by hate crime. Reasons for this may be that their institutions have no premises or that they intentionally maintain a low profile.

It was primarily the representatives of Jewish congregations who stated that their institutions have been subjected to regular exposure to hate crime and other forms of antisemitism. Such exposure is often perceived as coinciding with dates that are important either to Jews or to radical nationalist groups, such as Kristallnacht or Jewish holidays, or with incidents in the Middle East. The nature of such exposure is reported as including everything from abuse and harassment to vandalism, hate and threats.

The most common form of exposure described as affecting the interviewed Jewish institutions was hate messages and threats via letters, telephone calls and email. In their mildest form, these messages may urge the congregation to actively take a position on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, while others are much more aggressive and may contain death threats and extreme antisemitic rhetoric. The interviewees also described incidents such as vandalism in the form of stones being thrown at windows, Stars of David spray-painted on the façade of congregational buildings, objects depicting Zyklon-B gas canisters being placed outside Jewish buildings and attempts at forced entry.

English summary of report 2025:9

Stockholm: The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, 2025. 13p.

By Jonas Ring and David Shannon

The significance of socioeconomic background factors for whether or not individuals become involved in crime has been widely discussed in the field of criminology, and the research literature in this field is extensive. The aim of this report is to provide an easily accessible overview of the knowledge that has been produced by this research. The report’s findings are based on a literature review that includes narrative reviews, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, as well as individual studies that have examined individual-level differences in offending in relation to socioeconomic background factors. The review is based primarily on studies published by researchers in the United States, the Nordic countries and the rest of Europe, but also includes a number of studies from other parts of the world. Different studies have used different indicators of socioeconomic background, such as parents' socioeconomic status or levels of education or income, or the family's financial resources in some other sense. The review proceeds on the basis of these studies’ own definitions and measures of socioeconomic background or related concepts, such as social class. The review presents findings from research based on both registered and self-reported crime. 

 English summary of Brå report 2023:3

By Ciara Molloy

In the late 1970s, a criminal-based youth subculture known as the Bugsy Malones emerged in inner-city Dublin. Through the use of oral history interviews, this article avails of ‘proximate voices’ to shed light on the Bugsy Malones’ socio-economic background, their individual and group characteristics, and the rise of a subcultural mythology because of the involvement of Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch (a well-known Irish figure linked to organised crime) with the subculture. These proximate voices comprise n = 10 individuals who encountered the Bugsy Malones in a personal or professional capacity and shared lived experiences, physical spaces and/or interests with them. By capturing such voices, the article transcends caricatured press coverage and generates enhanced insight into this largely forgotten subculture.

Irish Economic and Social History, 51(1), 113-130.

By Sylvia Barack Fishman

Waves of Jews emigrating to the United States from colonial to contemporary times were often fleeing active persecution, regarded as pariahs by surrounding Christians and Muslim majorities in their lands of origin. But in America, despite a range of difficult challenges, the status and image of Jews were both gradually transformed. Several excellent studies document how perceptions of Jews as a clearly defined “race” gradually eroded as the American twentieth century wore on.1 Still, among children of the immigrant generation, and among Holocaust survivors and their descendants especially, many American Jews continued to believe that Jews were potentially vulnerable, and should remain vigilant to potential antisemitic flare-ups. Even Jews born in the United States often felt that White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, while “exceptional” and much more benign than most countries of origin in its treatment of the Jews, still exhibited occasional signs of antisemitism. Even after American Jews had become “white folks,” many insisted that their Jewish “whiteness” was still different than that of the WASPs, whom novelist Philip Roth desig- nated “the real owners of this place,”2 and Jewish often seemed to be “whiteness of a different color.”3 This Jewish sense of vulnerability was part of the motivation for American Jewish political and social activity on behalf of other oppressed groups and new immigrants: As sociologist Marshall Sklare demonstrated in his groundbreaking studies, many suburbanizing liberal American Jews in the 1950s and 1960s asserted that one of the most “essential” activities in order to be a “good Jew” was to “work for civil rights” and to help “attain equality for Negroes.”4 Many Jews took as their foundational religious motto the biblical principle “Be kind to the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19), meaning that Jews are a people whose lives intersect with other oppressed peoples, and Jews are responsible for helping other oppressed peoples. No longer stereotyped as foreign-looking, accented and struggling newcomers, successive generations of American Jews were increasingly (and sometimes negatively) portrayed as typifying the bourgeoisie or sometimes the nouveau riche. Satirical portrayals created by Jewish authors and filmmakers contributed: Herman Wouk, Philip Roth, and countless film and television screen-writers shone unflattering spotlights on aggressively upwardly mobile Jewish men and on Jewish women as the incarnation of spiritually bankrupt Judaism-as-consumerism. Ironically, among politically right-wing Americans, Jews were simultaneously stereotyped as communist “Reds” during and through the years leading up to the McCarthy/House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Both sides of this negative stereotyping—the Jew as capitalist consumer and the Jew as “Red Menace”—reveal the durability of Jews as a distinctive, “othered” minority American group. (continued_

OCCASIONAL PAPER SERIES no. 1/2021

Oxford ◆ Cambridge ◆ New York.◆ Jerusalem ◆ Toronto.◆ Rome;

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy

ISCAP 35p.

By Colin Murphy 

SUMMARY The growth in accessibility of online spaces and digital channels has been remarkable in recent years, providing citizens with many benefits, including enhanced communication, greater learning opportunities and easier access to private and public services. However, this growth has seen a commensurate increase in the associated risks and harms. Cyberbullying, cyber-violence and sexual extortion are just some of the dangers to which people, particularly vulnerable people, are exposed in the digital environment. In our 'always-on'world, issues such as cyberbullying can be a relentless experience and can leave victims with a constant sense of being under attack. Like the digital space itself, these dangers know no borders, which can make the problem a global issue. The solutions therefore are not 'one size fits all', but a combination of regional, national and transnational actions. The examples outlined here at regional level, while varying in size and scope, all have a common thread, which is the recognition of the risks to people and the desire to make a positive change. The approaches taken often involve a coordinated or cooperative style, with the involvement of students, teachers and parents. The message is consistent on the importance of recognising the dangers of the internet. It is important for victims to be able to quickly identify cyberbullying, cyberviolence and sexual extortion,and know how to deal with it and whom to turn to, in order to prevent risks from turning into harm.  

Brussels:  EPRS | European Parliamentary Research Service, 2025. 9p.