By Stuart Macdonald, Kamil Yilmaz, Chamin Herath, J.M. Berger, Suraj Lakhani, Lella Nouri, & Maura Conway

Focus on violent and non-violent activities and content in online spaces has yielded valuable insights into the evolution of extremist exploitation of social media and the internet. Over the past decade, much attention has been dedicated to understanding jihadist—particularly the so-called Islamic State’s—use of popular social media platforms and encrypted messaging apps to spread propaganda and entice followers. In recent years, however, attention to far-right extremist exploitation of online spaces has been growing. 1: As Conway, Scrivens, and Macnair have comprehensively documented, 2: right-wing extremist (a subset of the broader far-right) online communities have a lengthy history, transitioning from dial-up bulletin board systems; to static websites and online forums; to social media platforms, messaging and other communication “apps.” While far-right online communities were and still are largely decentralized, these communities can be considered loosely interconnected, their online interdependence tracing back to the “hot-links” page on the original Stormfront internet forum where outlinks to like-minded websites and forums were posted. Far-right, including right-wing extremist, online communities have since been described as an “ecosystem,” consisting of various types of online spaces or “entities” (e.g., websites, social media platforms). 3: Still, the actual extent to which these networks are interdependent or overlapping, as opposed to largely insulated groupings, platforms, and activities, remains to be fully interrogated. Doing so requires more localized research efforts, focused on identifying the nature of content shared and platforms used in far-right communities and ecosystems online to more fully examine interconnections between them.

Resolve Network, 2022. 48p.

By John Davies

This book challenges every common presumption that exists about the trafficking of women for the sex trade. It is a detailed account of an entire population of trafficked Albanian women whose varied experiences, including selling sex on the streets of France, clearly demonstrate how much the present discourse about trafficked women is misplaced and inadequate. The heterogeneity of the women involved and their relationships with various men is clearly presented as is the way women actively created a panoptical surveillance of themselves as a means of self-policing. There is no artificial divide between women who were deceived and abused and those who "choose" sex work; in fact the book clearly shows how peripheral involvement in sex work was to the real agenda of the women involved. Most of the women described in this book were not making economic decisions to escape desperate poverty nor were they the uneducated naïve entrapped into sexual slavery. The women's success in transiting trafficking to achieve their own goals without the assistance of any outside agency is a testimony to their resilience and resolve.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 325p.