By Mathieu Couttenier, Sophie Hatte, Mathias Thoenig, Stephanos Vlachos

We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 “minaret ban” referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People’s Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator’s nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%).

Lyon, France: University of Lyon, ENS de Lyon, Gate, 2019. 57p.

By Anne Speckhard

In recent years, violent extremist activities have escalated dramatically. Around the world, such groups increasingly target women and women’s rights. Using sexual and gender-based violence, they terrorize communities and destroy the social fabric. Different UN Security Council resolutions have recognized that violent extremism has gender dimensions. These lead to varying consequences for women and girls, men and boys. Women are frequently seen only as victims of violent extremism. But in reality, women play multiple roles. They are on the frontlines of prevention and response. They lead civil society organizations and bolster community resilience. Promoting women as agents of peace recognizes their contributions to peacebuilding and prevention of violence and upholds respect for the human rights of everyone in areas afflicted by violent extremism. Preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) is more effective, sustainable and meaningful if it includes the participation and perspectives of women. This training manual is designed for actors involved in P/CVE in Europe and Central Asia, including state officials, members of non-governmental organizations, community activists, staff of UN agencies, international and regional organizations, to help them understand violent extremism’s gender dimensions. It is designed as a training guide for staff and trainers who are working with different counterparts engaged in P/CVE and want to help create more effective and gender-sensitive responses. The five modules in this guide include learning objectives, explanatory text, warm-up activities, practical exercises, references for further reading, and empirical experiences from Europe and Central Asia.

Istanbul: United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) 2021. 122p.

By Beka Parsadanishvili, Ana Leladze

Recent events in Georgia - including the acts of violence committed against media representatives in July 2021 at a street rally organised by Georgian far-right groups and the arrest of 5 young people upon charges of joining a terrorist organisation in the Pankisi Gorge on 24 August - indicate that not only is violent extremism actively disseminated in the territory of Georgia, but it also endangers the national security architecture. This research report provides a detailed description of the key characteristics of the jihadist and far-right narratives disseminated in Georgia. It is noteworthy that this document does not study far-left narrative as it has been less violent and fairly infrequent in Georgia. In order to study violent extremist narrative disseminated in the territory of Georgia, semi-structured interviews were conducted with subject-matter experts, content and language of the disseminated narrative were intensively studied through qualitative and quantitative, relevant literature as well as secondary and tertiary data were researched and processed.

Tbilisi: Georgian Centre for Strategy and Development (GCSD),2022. 74p.

By Eden Cole

Commissioned by the Georgian Centre for Strategy and Development (GCSD) as a component of a four-year multi-tier programme on ‘Enhancing the Capacity of Georgia in Preventing Violent Extremism and Radicalization’ funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Norway, this Handbook was developed to facilitate Georgia’s ‘Permanent Interagency Commission on Elaboration of the National Counterterrorism Strategy (CNCS)’ Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) policy development and cooperative programming processes. In a field crowded with documentation and narratives on diverse P/CVE approaches, this Handbook’s objective is to focus the audience’s attention on counter-terrorism and P/CVE best practice at international and European levels. At the same time, the Handbook enables practitioners from state institutions to sustain institutional P/CVE knowledge and to develop capacity to address P/CVE issues across Georgian society. The Handbook can also be used for training purposes, as well as by other stakeholders to develop their own capacity to implement projects aimed at understanding and limiting the threat of violent extremism. Beginning with an introduction to the evolution of terrorism over the last fifty years, the Handbook outlines the challenges of terrorism to democratic states, and the legal and policy dimensions of effective counter-terrorism and extremism prevention. The Handbook then addresses specific thematic issues, including institutional frameworks for P/CVE, cooperation between state and society, radicalization prevention, the return of foreign terrorist fighters and their families, and broader counter-terrorism and P/CVE communication challenges. Placing an emphasis on developing original material and incorporating a variety of relevant and easily accessible best practice materials, the aim across all seven chapters is to ensure that a ‘Whole-of-Society’ approach to P/CVE issues is emphasised in a user-friendly format. Against the background of fifty years of terrorism, democratic societies are still exposed to a variety of risks posed by local and strategic terrorism. Although waves of terrorism occur in peaks and troughs, as contested and ungoverned spaces continue to harbour often well-funded and supplied terrorist and insurgent groups, social and technological developments compound the significant risks posed by even small terrorist movements and cells.

Tbilisi: Georgian Centre for Strategy and Development (GCSD), 2019. 77p.

By Aleksandra Dier and Gretchen Baldwin

While only a small percentage of men become involved in violent extremism, the majority of violent extremists are men. Across the ideological spectrum, violent extremist and terrorist groups exploit male sentiments of emasculation and loss of power and appeal to ideas of manhood in their recruitment efforts. Yet policymakers rarely focus on gender to help them understand why some men engage in violence and others do not or what role peaceful notions of masculinity play in preventing radicalization and terrorism. Similarly, male-dominated counterterrorism institutions rarely pose the question of how masculinities shape these institutions and their approaches to counterterrorism and countering violent extremism (CVE).

This report discusses masculinities—the socially constructed ideas of what it means to be a man—as they are constructed and used by violent extremist groups, as they exist in and interact with society, and as they interplay with the state. It draws on examples pertaining to both “Islamist” and extreme right-wing terrorism, considering differences not just between but also within these ideologies.

New York: International Peace Institute and UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, 2022. 22p.

By Justin Everett Cobain Tetrault

Right-wing nationalist movements have gained traction in Westernized countries such as France, Greece, Hungary, Austria, the United States, and Germany, where political figures or groups have mobilized nationalist ideas and right-wing populist sentiment to gain governmental power and/or influence public policy (Mudde 2014, BBC News 2019, Perry & Scrivens 2018: 177). Contrary to Canada’s benevolent international reputation, Canadians have demonstrated increasingly exclusionary politics in the last decade. Anti-Islam rhetoric, for instance, has substantial legitimacy in popular discourse and Canadians are increasingly skeptical of the country’s federal multiculturalism policy (Angus Reid 2017, Braun 2018, Andrew-Gee 2015; Angus Reid 2010, Canseco 2019, Todd 2017). Academics, journalists, and public figures assert that Canada is experiencing “similar trends” to Western Europe’s wave of right-wing populism, pointing to the “growing threat” posed by Canadian far-right groups, also referred to as “rightwing extremists”, “hate groups”, and sometimes the “alt-right” (Perry & Scrivens 2018: 177, Boutilier 2018, Mastracci 2017, McKenna 2019, Habib 2019). Upon closer scrutiny, dominant scholarly and popular discourse tends to reduce this discussion to a problem of white nationalist ideology and the public safety risks posed by these groups, such as terrorism, hate crime, threats and intimidation, and hate speech. Experts struggle to explain how right-wing and far-right groups operate as a social movement seeking mainstream legitimacy in Canada, and the dominant fixation on “extremism” in the form of white nationalism and criminality sometimes obfuscates significant trends in right-wing organizing. Using Canada’s yellow vests movement as a case study, this project identifies and critiques three broader trends in scholarship on right-wing and far-right social movements.

Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2021. 203p.

Edited by Shirley Leitch and Paul Pickering

Terrorism, global pandemics, climate change, wars and all the major threats of our age have been targets of online extremism. The same social media occupying the heartland of our social world leaves us vulnerable to cybercrime, electoral fraud and the ‘fake news’ fuelling the rise of far-right violence and hate speech. In the face of widespread calls for action, governments struggle to reform legal and regulatory frameworks designed for an analogue age. And what of our rights as citizens? As politicians and lawyers run to catch up to the future as it disappears over the horizon, who guarantees our right to free speech, to free and fair elections, to play video games, to surf the Net, to believe ‘fake news’?

Rethinking Social Media and Extremism offers a broad range of perspectives on violent extremism online and how to stop it. As one major crisis follows another and a global pandemic accelerates our turn to digital technologies, attending to the issues raised in this book becomes ever more urgent.

Canberra: Australian University Press, 2022. 194p.

By Michael Jensen, Patrick James, Gary LaFree, Aaron Safer-Lichtenstein, Elizabeth Yates

Emerging communication technologies, and social media platforms in particular, play an increasingly important role in the radicalization and mobilization processes of violent and non-violent extremists (Archetti, 2015; Cohen et al., 2014; Farwell, 2014; Klausen, 2015). However, the extent to which extremists utilize social media, and whether it influences terrorist outcomes, is still not well understood (Conway, 2017). This research brief expands the current knowledge base by leveraging newly collected data on the social media activities of 479 extremists in the PIRUS dataset who radicalized between 2005 and 2016.[1] This includes descriptive analyses of the frequency of social media usage among U.S. extremists, the types of social media platforms used, the differences in the rates of social media use by ideology and group membership, the purposes of social media use, and the impact of social media on foreign fighter travel and domestic terrorism plots.

We define social media in the PIRUS dataset as any form of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content, such as videos and images. This form of online communication is distinct from other types of internet usage in that it emphasizes online user-to-user communication rather than passively viewing content hosted by an online domain. Additionally, our definition of social media does not include file-sharing sites (e.g., Torrent networks, Dropbox, P2P networks, etc.).

College Park, MD: START, University of Maryland, 2018. 20p.

By E. P. Thompson

From the introduction: “This book has a clumsy title, but it is.one which meets its purpose. making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making. Class, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. There is, of course, a difference. "Work­ ing classes" is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes.”

Vintage Books· A Division Of Random House. New York. 1963. 423p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Michel Foucault. Translation by Richard Howard

From Chapter 1: “At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incanta- tions a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of ter- ror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.”

Vintage Random House. 1965. 317p.

By T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel ]. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford.

At this moment in world history anti-Semitism is not manifesting itself with the full and violent destructiveness of which we know it to be capable. Even a social disease has its periods of quiescence during which the social scientists, like the biologist or the physician, can study it in the search for more effective ways to prevent or reduce the virulence of the next outbreak.

Today the world scarcely remembers the mechanized persecution and extermination of millions of human beings only a short span of years away in what was once regarded as the citadel of Western civilization. Yet the con­ science of many men was aroused. How could it be, they asked each other, that in a culture of law, order, and reason, there should have survived the irrational remnants of ancient racial and religious hatreds? (From the Foreword).

American Jewish Committee. Pub. III. 1950. 989p.

By Janice M. Irvine

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 349p.

By Christina Zanfagna

In the 1990s, Los Angeles was home to numerous radical social and environmental eruptions. In the face of several major earthquakes and floods, riots and economic insecurity, police brutality and mass incarceration, some young black Angelenos turned to holy hip hop—a movement merging Christianity and hip hop culture—to “save” themselves and the city. Converting street corners to open-air churches and gangsta rap beats into anthems of praise, holy hip hoppers used gospel rap to navigate complicated social and spiritual realities and to transform the Southland’s fractured terrains into musical Zions. Armed with beats, rhymes, and bibles, they journeyed through black Lutheran congregations, prison ministries, African churches, reggae dancehalls, hip hop clubs, Nation of Islam meetings, and Black Lives Matter marches. Zanfagna’s fascinating ethnography provides a contemporary and unique view of black LA, offering a much-needed perspective on how music and religion intertwine in people’s everyday experiences.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017. 220p.

By Gretchen Kerr

This book addresses the major forms of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in children’s sport, including sexual, physical, and psychological violence and neglect. It reviews the historical, sociocultural, and political influences on violence towards children, and sets out future agendas for research and practice to eliminate GBV in sport. The book argues that for GBV to occur and be sustained over time, it must be facilitated by a system that enables this violence, protects the perpetrator, disables bystanders, silences the victims, and/or fails to provide a structure by which to address victims’ or bystanders’ concerns. Drawing on empirical research from across a range of disciplines, including sport sociology, sport psychology, developmental psychology, and coaching, and examining real life case studies of GBV in sport at all levels, the book makes a powerful case for radical change in our current systems of sport governance, safeguarding, and athlete welfare. This is important reading for any student, researcher, policy-maker, coach, welfare officer or counsellor with an interest in sport, gender studies, safeguarding, criminology, or sociology.

London; New York: Routledge, 2023. 171p.

By Mia-Marie Hammarlin

This book illuminates the personal experience of being at the centre of a media scandal. The existential level of that experience is highlighted by means of the application of ethnological and phenomenological perspectives to extensive empirical material drawn from a Swedish context. The questions raised and answered in this book include the following: How does the experience of being the protagonist in a media scandal affect a person’s everyday life? What happens to routines, trust, and self-confidence? How does it change the basic settings of his or her lifeworld? The analysis also contributes new perspectives on the fusion between interpersonal communication that takes place face to face, such as gossip and rumours, and traditional news media in the course of a scandal. A scandal derives its momentum from the audiences, whose engagement in the moral story determines its dissemination and duration. The nature of that engagement also affects the protagonist in specific ways. Members of the public participate through traditional oral communication, one vital aspect of which is activity in digital, social forums. The author argues that gossip and rumour must be included in the idea of the media system if we are to be able to understand the formation and power of a media scandal, a contention which entails critiques of earlier research. Oral interpersonal communication does not disappear when new communication possibilities arise. Indeed, it may be invigorated by them. The term news legend is introduced, to capture the entanglement between traditional news-media storytelling and oral narrative

Lund: Lund University Press, 2019. 208p.

By Faith Agostinone Wilson

This text analyses the rapid rise of global authoritarian populism and fascism and how these movements incorporate misogyny into their ideologies within and beyond social media. Readership: Readership includes those interested in critical, Marxist, and feminist analyses of the role of media in the rise of authoritarian populism and fascism, within the context of recent political events.

Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2020. 230p.

By Asta Zelenkauskaitė

With the prevalence of disinformation geared to instill doubt rather than clarity, Creating Chaos Online unmasks disinformation when it attempts to pass as deliberation in the public sphere and distorts the democratic processes. Asta Zelenkauskaitė finds that repeated tropes justifying Russian trolling were found to circulate across not only all analyzed media platforms’ comments but also across two analyzed sociopolitical contexts suggesting the orchestrated efforts behind messaging. Through a dystopian vision of publics that are expected to navigate in the sea of uncertain both authentic and orchestrated content, pushed by human and nonhuman actors, Creating Chaos Online offers a concept of post-publics. The idea of post-publics is reflected within the continuum of treatment of public, counter public, and anti-public. This book argues that affect-instilled arguments used in public deliberation in times of uncertainty, along with whataboutism constitute a playbook for chaos online.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 318p.

By Timothy Williams

Why do people participate in genocide? The Complexity of Evil responds to this fundamental question by drawing on political science, sociology, criminology, anthropology, social psychology, and history to develop a model which can explain perpetration across various different cases. Focusing in particular on the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, The Complexity of Evil model draws on, systematically sorts, and causally orders a wealth of scholarly literature and supplements it with original field research data from interviews with former members of the Khmer Rouge. The model is systematic and abstract, as well as empirically grounded, providing a tool for understanding the micro-foundations of various cases of genocide. Ultimately this model highlights that the motivations for perpetrating genocide are both complex in their diversity and banal in their ordinariness and mundanity.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 281p.

By Michael Welch

The “Bastille Effect” refers to the unique ways that former sites of political imprisonment are transformed, physically and culturally. In their afterlives, these sites represent sustained efforts to hold perpetrators accountable for state violence. For that narrative to surface, the sites must be cleansed of their profane past. In some cases, clergy are even enlisted to perform purifying rituals that grant the sites a new identity as memorials. Around the globe, carceral sites have been dramatically repurposed into places of enlightenment that offer inspiring allegories of human rights. Interpreting the complexities of those common threads, this book weaves together a broad range of cultural, interdisciplinary, and critical thought to offer new insights into the study of political imprisonment, collective memory, and post-conflict societies.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022. 239p.

By Matthew P. Steinberg and Johanna Lacoe Matthew P. SteinbergJohanna LacoeMatthewMatthew P. SteinbergJohanna Laco

One important question about school discipline is whether it helps or harms those being disciplined. But a second, equally important question is whether a push to reduce the number of suspensions is harmful to the rule-abiding majority.

This study examines outcomes in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), which made dramatic changes to its code of conduct during the 2012–13 school year. Specifically, it instituted a new ban on out-of-school suspensions (OSS) for low-level “conduct” offenses—such as profanity or failure to follow classroom rules—and reduced the length of OSS for more serious infractions. To gauge the impacts of these changes, Matthew Steinberg (University of Pennsylvania) and Johanna Lacoe (Mathematica) examined data before and after they were implemented, and penned two scholarly papers: one that focuses on the district-level effects of the change in discipline policy, and a second that explores patterns of attendance and achievement at the school, grade, and individual levels.

Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2017. 35p.