By The Council of Europe

Although the misuse of new technologies by terrorist actors has been a major concern for some time, the capabilities offered by (and the availability of) a range of new and emerging technologies – including gaming platforms, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D-printed weapons – have heightened these fears even further. An analysis of how and why terrorists adopt new technologies suggests that it remains highly context specific, with the extent and speed of innovation affected by internal factors (for example strategic, structural and individual factors) and external factors, particularly relationships, resources and the effects of counter-terrorism. In combination, these factors can encourage or inhibit the adoption of new technologies by terrorist actors, resulting in significant variations in the adoption and use of key technologies of concern. Terrorist actors in or affecting Europe have adopted (or are beginning to adopt) many of these technologies. Social media platforms, small or micro platforms, terrorist-hosted websites and gaming or gaming-adjacent platforms are all playing critical roles in the radicalisation and recruitment process. Emerging technologies used in this process include the decentralised web, the dark web and, most recently, generative AI. Although many terrorist attacks in Europe use a low-tech modus operandi, technology plays a key role in their preparation, planning and subsequent promotion. Propaganda and instructional material – typically stored and shared online – play a prominent role in shaping attack targets and methodology. For example, the emergence of 3D-printed weapon usage by terrorist actors in Europe has been fuelled by instructional materials developed by an active online subculture. Other far-right online subcultures have also encouraged the live-streaming of attacks and sharing of manifestos online. Terrorist actors in Europe use a range of licit and illicit activities to fund their attacks and radicalisation and recruitment activities, some of which (but not all) require the use of new technologies. These include mobile payment systems, online exchanges and wallets, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer online funds transfers and the solicitation of donations on social media platforms. Simultaneously, terrorist actors outside Europe, notably ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant)/Daesh, are increasingly encouraging donations via virtual assets, driving a rise in the presence of virtual assets in European terrorist financing arrests and prosecutions. Interviews with national, regional and international experts identified lessons learned and good practices when responding to terrorist misuse of new technologies. These include reducing the lag between terrorist exploitation of new technologies and counter-terrorism responses to it (through horizon scanning exercises and greater information sharing), the criticality of multistakeholder approaches, the importance of identifying and managing human rights-related risks, and the benefits of greater strategic clarity, which can lead to a focus on desired outcomes, rather than the steps required to reach them

By Mohamed Bin Ali, Sabariah Hussin and Muhammad Haziq Bin Jani

Recent years have shown that extremist worldviews are no longer limited to specific ideologies, regions, or grievances. Whether driven by Islamist militancy, far-right conspiracies, or historical grievances, the dissemination of radical beliefs today is shaped by a deeper and more fundamental issue: extremist epistemology, especially regarding how individuals come to know, filter, and reinforce what they believe to be true.

COMMENTARY

At the heart of radicalisation lies an epistemology that rigidly filters information, dismisses contradictory evidence, and resists alternative perspectives. Quassim Cassam and Olivia Bailey have described this as a “closed-minded worldview” that replaces open inquiry with ideological purity. In this view, epistemology refers not to formal theories of knowledge, but to the everyday frameworks and practices by which individuals justify their beliefs and decide what to believe or reject.

When a person becomes epistemically closed off – often through social media echo chambers or ideological networks – their epistemic autonomy is compromised. They no longer analyse evidence critically, instead relying on trusted sources or in-groups to determine what qualifies as “truth.” This vulnerability is what extremist groups exploit, online and offline.

Self-radicalised individuals – including those in Singapore detained under the Internal Security Act for plotting attacks or attempting to travel to conflict zones – often fell into these epistemic traps. Although the content they consumed may have varied, their radicalisation process was similar: they entered epistemic environments that made violence appear not only justified but also necessary.

These environments often revolve around radical ideologies that reinforce extremist epistemology by offering binary moral frameworks that simplify complex realities and by providing emotionally resonant certainties about the future – such as promises of martyrdom or apocalyptic triumph. These approaches help define individuals as they seek clarity, purpose, or control amid uncertainty.

S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU Singapore, 2025. 5p.

Attempts to influence elected officials and municipal administrations.

By David Andersson, Anna Horgby and Albin Östervall

This is a study of undue influence exerted by actors and groups constituting a systemic threat in Sweden, including undue influence against elected officials, political parties and decision-making bodies. The study also sheds light on what forms undue influence can take against municipalities. Particular focus is on actors and groups connected to organised crime.

English summary of Brå report 2025:4 Stockholm: The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) -2025. 14p.

By The Program on Extremism at The George Washington University

At a time in which violent Left Wing extremism is seeing a massive surge, this report sheds light on how armed, organized left-wing militias have quietly emerged across the U.S., often overlooked or mischaracterized by law enforcement, policymakers, and the media.

Drawing on thousands of court records, open-source videos, social media pages, manifestos, and more, the report profiles four prominent groups:

• Redneck Revolt / John Brown Gun Clubs

• The Socialist Rifle Association

• The Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC)

• The Huey P. Newton Gun Club / Guerilla Mainframe / Geronimo Tactical

These groups are armed, ideologically driven, and increasingly well-organized - championing causes from anti-fascism and Black nationalism to anti-capitalism. Many boast high levels of veteran involvement and adopt military-style recruitment tactics aimed at active-duty service members and former personnel.

Key findings include:

• Left-wing militias are largely absent from federal extremism frameworks, allowing them to operate with less scrutiny than their right-wing counterparts.

• Their rise correlates with high-profile flashpoints like the Ferguson protests and the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

• They are highly active online, often with little-to-no content moderation, cultivating large digital followings across platforms like TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and X.

• While less violent overall, these groups glorify attacks by ideological allies and exhibit many of the same behaviors seen in right-wing militia ecosystems.

The Silent Rise of the Left-Wing Militia examines an underexplored and rapidly growing element of the domestic extremist landscape, at a time of rampant political violence across the ideological spectrum and urges policymakers, analysts, and the public to confront a rapidly evolving militia landscape without ideological blinders.

Washington, DC: The Program on Extremism at The George Washington University , 2025. 78p.

By Sardelić, Julija

This open-access book presents a socio-legal analysis of immediate responses to large-scale refugee displacement in Europe after the 1951 Refugee Convention came into force, focusing on the countries to which refugees initially fled or through which they passed (namely Austria and, initially, Yugoslavia, followed by several of the former Yugoslav countries). First, it investigates the immediate responses to refugee movements following the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution by Soviet troops. Second, it examines the responses to individuals seeking asylum after being displaced during the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Third, it analyses the responses of the same countries to refugees fleeing Global South countries (predominantly Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan) in 2015 and 2016. Finally, it explores how these countries responded to the mass displacement of refugees from Ukraine. The book argues that these countries have positioned themselves as “transit” or temporary protection countries in order to avoid assuming long-term responsibility for a larger number of refugees. As a consequence, they granted various forms of temporary legal status to refugees that differed from the refugee status defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention. These legal statuses were hierarchical (in terms of the rights attached to them) and racialized, with the fewest rights granted to refugees from the Global South and other negatively racialized groups. The book traces the usage of self-serving politics of diversity and selective memory to legitimise why refugees could not be protected long-term in these countries, and also why there were such differences in treatment of refugees.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2025.

By Amy Cooter

A dominant analytical frame has emerged in extremism studies that attributes nearly all right wing, far right, or nostalgic group ideology1 and action to white supremacy. Some versions of this narrative further posit that these extremist groups intentionally and consciously effect white supremacy through a “cohesive social network based on commonly held beliefs,” a “white power movement.”2 However, these conceptions sometimes lack definitions of social movements, white supremacy, and other key concepts that are central to their arguments.3 This has led to over-generalizations about nostalgic group actors’ motives and goals in a way that downplays both the power of white supremacy as a hegemonic system and the specific harms caused by overtly supremacist actors. This paper clarifies a social science understanding of the key, but sometimes taken-for-granted, terms necessary for understanding these dynamics and demonstrates how faulty or unclear usage of this terminology leads to both analytical problems and the perpetuation of power structures that the field of extremism studies hopes to address. Specifically, I argue that improper conceptualization of white supremacy and related terms creates risks falling into three categories: analytic accuracy and predictive capacity, preventing near-term harm, and perpetuating white supremacy’s power structure and radicalization.

Monterey, CA: Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism, Middlebury Institute of International Studies. 2024. 29p.

By Noor Huda Ismail and Putri Kusuma Amanda

The rise of JAD Nusantara, an ISIS-linked online network drawing in large numbers of minors, exposes serious gaps in Indonesia’s child protection systems. Vulnerable adolescents, often grappling with bullying, isolation, or absent parents, are being recruited without showing clear outward signs of radicalisation. In line with UN child rights standards, Indonesia must adopt an approach that prioritises rehabilitative, child-centred responses, safeguarding children’s rights while tackling the vulnerabilities and special needs that extremists exploit.

COMMENTARY
The case of a 12-year-old boy in Pemalang, Central Java, who joined the terrorist group JAD Nusantara, underscores a worrisome trend: radicalisation is increasingly happening entirely online, beyond parental or authority awareness. 

Social media platforms and messaging apps serve as conduits, enabling extremist content to reach vulnerable youth undetected. Research analyses show that extremism thrives on platforms that offer anonymity, rapid dissemination, and emotional appeal – qualities that make virtual spaces ideal for radical recruitment. 

Detecting online-driven radicalisation through traditional community surveillance is extremely difficult. Therefore, child protection systems need to adopt digital literacy and monitoring capabilities so that educators and social workers, not just security personnel, can recognize warning signs and intervene early.

A comprehensive society-wide strategy is needed – one that identifies young people at risk and engages them through pastoral, not punitive, channels.

S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU Singapore, 2025. 6p.

By Robin O'Luanaigh, Hannah Ritchey and Frances Breidenstein

One image shows two young women sparring with each other, donning boxing gloves and athletic wear. A second image shows a young woman wrapping her hands and wrists, presumably preparing for a fight. On her arm is a tattoo of an Othala rune, a symbol common in neo-Nazi and white supremacist communities. 

These images, identified in online Active Club spaces, diverge from more traditional portrayals of women in right-wing extremist movements and communities. Instead of quaint cottagecore aesthetics and traditional ‘tradwives’ tending to the family and home, these images present women as activists, ideologues and warriors. While the Active Club network’s portrayals of women still promote traditional gender roles–especially within romantic relationships–the invocation of ‘warrior women’ tropes opens the door to a more palatable form of right-wing extremist activism – one that is less overtly misogynistic and ostensibly more ‘gender equal’. 

This Insight serves as a first look into the hypermasculine extremist spaces and communities of the Active Club network and how they co-opt and utilise images of women in their propaganda. We first introduce the Active Club network before reviewing existing literature on representations of women in right-wing extremist content. Next, we identify and discuss distinctly gendered tropes regarding the representation of women and couples in Active Club content. We conclude with a cautionary analysis of how such content can make Active Clubs and similar organisations palatable to women who may view these groups as gender-equal or empowering. 

Global Network on Extremism & Technology, 2023. 

By Middlebury Institute of International Studies

Active Clubs make up a decentralized network of individually-formed organizations that are centered around the premise of a white supremacist fraternal brotherhood. First introduced in December of 2020 by Robert Rundo, the leader of the white supremacist Rise Above Movement (R.A.M), Active Clubs are intended to preserve and defend the white population and traditional European culture from a perceived global genocide by non-white ethnic and racial groups. 

Rundo was inspired to create the Active Club network—something he referred to as “white nationalism 3.0”—in response to the numerous arrests of R.A.M. members made in 2018. He wanted to create an organization that would be less perceptible to law enforcement, and thus less susceptible to disruption or destruction. From this, Active Clubs were born—small, decentralized organizations that would focus recruitment efforts on localized areas and thus garner less attention than traditional white nationalist organizations. This structure would also ensure that Active Clubs were not reliant on a particular physical entity or leadership figure for survival.

Active Clubs provide like-minded white men with physical spaces where they can train in mixed martial arts in preparation for war against their perceived enemies. Ideologically, Active Clubs adhere to neofascist and accelerationist principles, with the promotion of violence comprising a key theme in Active Club communication and propaganda. Located across the United States and in several countries transnationally, the Active Club network ensures that groups of men devoted to training for battle are available for mobilization in multiple locations across Western countries. 

Monterey, CA: Middlebury Institute of International Studies and Center on terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, 2024.

 By Amy Cooter

There has been increasing attention to how military service members and veterans may be recruited or exploited by extremists, yet there is little research on precisely how this may happen or on how such ties may, in turn, influence military cohesion. It is important to emphasize that the vast majority of service members are not extremist, but a growing number of domestic extremists have military connections who may then have an outsized ability to enact harm, including by training others in military techniques. Given the potential for veterans’ knowledge and experiences to be exploited by extremist groups, understanding these connections is pressing. This paper shares findings from an in-depth interview study with 42 veterans from all military branches who collectively shed light on how extremism influences various aspects of military life from recruitment to readiness and who offer concrete steps the military could pursue at every stage of service to limit extremists’ exploitation of the institution and those who serve.

Monterey, CA: Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies 2025. 31p.

By Ciarán O’Connor, Laurie Wood, Katherine Keneally and Kevin D. Reyes

The number of Active Clubs in the United States, Canada and Europe is increasing, posing a threat to public safety. Active Clubs (“ACs”) are white nationalist extremist groups that emphasize physical fitness and hand-to-hand combat skills and have a history of violence. Though each “club” is autonomous, the groups frequently engage in coordinated activities offline, such as mixed martial arts (MMA) tournaments, protests and physical training. In recent years, these clubs have used their social media profiles to encourage likeminded individuals to establish their own clubs in their respective locations. ISD’s research shows this strategy has been highly effective throughout the US.

This report identifies and analyzes the network of Active Clubs operating within the US along three themes: ideology, tactics and targets. The research predominately focuses on the use of the messaging platform Telegram by ACs, and includes detailed data analysis exploring how this network uses Telegram to produce and promote white nationalist propaganda, expand the network of clubs, and facilitate on- and offline collaboration between members and groups.

Amman | Berlin | London | Paris | Washington DC: Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2023. 17p.

By  Michael Miller Yoder,  David West Brown &  Kathleen M. Carley 

Much research has focused on the role of the alt-right in pushing far-right narratives into mainstream discourse. In this work, we focus on the alt-right’s effects on extremist narratives themselves. From 2012 to 2017, we find a rise in alt-right, 4chan-like discourse styles across multiple communication platforms known for white supremacist extremism, such as Stormfront. This discourse style incorporates inflammatory insults, irreverent comments, and talk about memes and online “chan” culture itself. A network analysis of one far-right extremist platform suggests that central users adopt and spread this alt-right style. This analysis has implications for understanding influence and change in online white supremacist extremism, as well as the role of style in white supremacist communications. Warning: This paper contains examples of hateful and offensive language.

Comput Math Organ Theory Volume 31, pages 222–235, (2025)

By Amy C. Gaudion

In his 2022 book, Ward Farnsworth crafts a metaphor from the lead-pipe theory for the fall of Rome to consider how rage and misinformation traveling through today’s technology-enabled pipes are poisoning our civic engagement and threatening our governmental structures: “We have built networks for the delivery of information––the internet, and especially social media. These networks too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage.” This Article carries the metaphor into a new context and considers what should be done when the poison being transported through the digital pipes is directed at members of the U.S. military. While extremism in the U.S. military is not a new threat, the events of January 6, 2021, brought the threat into much sharper focus. It exposed three preexisting trends, each sitting in plain sight but not yet woven together. These trends include a growing acceptance of extremist views and ideologies in U.S. military and veteran communities, an increase in violent extremist acts committed by individuals with military backgrounds, and the enhanced use of digital platforms by extremist groups to target their messaging to and strengthen their recruitment of individuals with military experience. To return to the metaphor, the extremist poison is teeming through the pipes at an alarming rate, and the number of pipes has increased to include social media platforms, encrypted chat tools, gaming platforms, podcasts, and music streaming apps, including YouTube, Discord, Gab, Telegram, and WhatsApp, among many others. In offering these observations, the author is mindful of not overstating the threat and takes seriously warnings as to the adverse consequences that follow from hyperbole and exaggeration. Indeed, a fundamental difficulty is the lack of understanding as to scope and scale of the extremism threat in the U.S. military. This Article attempts to draw the contours of that threat, exposes the structural and legal obstacles that make countering extremism in the military such a fraught exercise, and identifies actors, tools, and mechanisms—beyond the conventional options––able to overcome these long-standing structural and institutional obstacles.

Indiana Law Journal | Vol. 100:1743 | 2025, Penn State Dickinson Law Research Paper 10-2025

By Oge Samuel Okonkwo

Boko Haram’s emergence in Northern Nigeria is closely tied to systemic vulnerabilities within the Almajiri system, a traditional Islamic educational framework mainly for boys. Founded by Mohammed Yusuf, an Almajiri graduate himself, the terror group exploited socio-cultural fractures, leveraging identity-based grievances, economic deprivation, and governance failures to recruit marginalised Almajirai. While the Almajiri system itself does not inherently radicalise individuals, it produces a large, unemployed youth demographic with a strong collective identity, creating fertile ground for extremist exploitation.Addressing systemic marginalisation and poverty within Nigeria's Almajiri educational system is crucial for preventing youth radicalisation, requiring integrated reforms across education, governance, and community engagement spheres.

The Hague: The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT)  2025. 18p.

By Sabariah Hussin

SYNOPSIS
The evolving nature of online self-radicalisation in Singapore raises pressing concerns that go beyond traditional counterterrorism frameworks. While Singapore’s preventive strategies are largely effective, emerging digital dynamics and psychosocial vulnerabilities call for more spiritually grounded, trauma-informed, and community-empowered approaches.

COMMENTARY
The issue of youth radicalisation is gaining attention in Singapore. During a speech by Acting Minister for Muslim Affairs, Faishal Ibrahim, at the Religious Rehabilitation Group (RRG) retreat on 24 June 2025, he noted that the availability of extremist content and the emergence of ideologically themed online communities have contributed to a gradual increase in radicalisation among young people. Given that many of these individuals are still developing their identities and critical thinking skills, they may be more susceptible to these influences.
It is concerning that a 17-year-old supporter of far-right ideology was reportedly planning a mass shooting of worshippers attending Friday prayers, while a 15-year-old girl expressed a desire to marry an ISIS fighter and engage in combat overseas. Both cases illustrate the phenomenon of self-radicalisation occurring entirely through online platforms.
These developments highlight a significant and rapid evolution in the patterns and scope of radicalisation, necessitating a thorough reassessment of Singapore’s CVE (countering violent extremism) strategies.

S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU Singapore, 2025. 6p.

Social media companies are profiting from lies about extreme weather events.

• On X, 88% of misleading extreme weather posts were from verified accounts. The platform enables paid subscriptions for five of these accounts – which combined have 14 million followers 

• On YouTube, 73% of posts were from verified accounts. YouTube displayed ads next to 29% of misleading extreme weather videos. 

• On Facebook and Instagram, 64% of posts were from verified accounts. Meta is sharing ad revenue with three content creators pushing misleading claims, enabling them to share in Meta’s revenue from ads near their posts. 

By Wesam Charkawi , Kevin Dunn ,  Ana-Maria Bliuc

Since the September 11 attacks, prevention and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) programs have rapidly increased worldwide, garnering significant interest among researchers. This paper is a systematic review focusing on the evaluations of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention programs from 2001 until 2020. The review identified 74 program evaluations that included satisfactory measures and metrics. Only 32% of the studies deemed the intervention successful, 55% described limited success, and 8% deemed the program had failed. Many of the programs evaluated failed to reach their objectives; some generated negative outcomes such as community disdain and an increase in the likelihood of alienation and stigma. Success was largely a self-assessed measure by the facilitators or stakeholders of the programs or the evaluators of the study. Success indicators can be operationalized as the degree of enhanced sense of belonging (connectedness to the community, social connection), trust and willingness to engage in programs, development of critical thinking skills (integrative complexity theory), and a strong sense of worth (quest for significance). Without a generally accepted set of metrics and no cohesive framework for conducting evaluations, this review offers an important addition to the field on the evidence suitable for program evaluations. An important aim of this systematic review was to identify what makes an effective and successful countering violent extremism program. The key findings indicate that enhancing belonging, identity, trust and community engagement, acknowledging perceptions of injustice, religious mentoring, and the promotion of critical thinking/self-reflection are associated with successful programs. The findings press upon policymakers, funders, and researchers the need to consider and support high-quality evaluations of programs.

International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, 2024., 19p.

By By Stephane J. Baele,* Lewys Brace, and Elahe Naserian 

Scholars and practitioners investigating extremist and violent political actors’ online communications face increasingly large information environments containing ever-growing amounts of data to find, collect, organise, and analyse. In this context, this article encourages terrorism and extremism analysts to use computational visual methods, mirroring for images what is now routinely done for text. Specifically, we chart how computer vision methods can be successfully applied to strengthen the study of extremist and violent political actors’ online ecosystems. Deploying two such methods – unsupervised deep clustering and supervised object identification – on an illustrative case (an original corpus containing thousands of images collected from incel platforms) allows us to explain the logic of these tools, to identify their specific advantages (and limitations), and to subsequently propose a research workflow associating computational methods with the other visual analysis approaches traditionally leveraged  

Perspectives on Terrorism, Volume XIX, Issue 1 March 2025  

By Stephane J. Baele and & Lewys Brace

How to best chart and analyse extremist digital ecosystems? This paper proposes to complement standard mapping methods based on URL outlinks, which are typically deployed but present several critical flaws, with socio-semantic network analysis. Adapting bi-nodal socio-semantic network principles to the specificities of extremist and terrorist digital communications, we put forward a simple yet efficient method for generating informative networks based on ideological or thematic proximity rather than URL connections. We use three datasets of various sizes and nature (French far-right websites, British far-right websites, US far-right Telegram channels) to compare traditional URL-based vs. socio-semantic networks, demonstrating how the latter bypasses the flaws of the former and offers significant advantages in multi-methods research designs. This empirical validation of our methodological proposition unfolds several new observations concerning the contemporary Western far-right digital ecosystem, highlighting specificities and commonalities of its French, British, and American variants.

By Luke Baumgartner

On July 22, 2011, 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik embarked on a threehour murder spree across Norway, killing seventy-seven in what would become the single largest loss of life in the country since the Second World War. Beginning that morning in central Oslo, Breivik’s terrorist attack claimed its first victims after detonating a van filled with nearly one ton of explosives outside of the Regjeringskvartalet complex, which housed the prime minister’s administrative offices. Disguised as a police officer, Breivik then boarded a ferry for the island of Utøya, where he proceeded to kill sixty-nine students attending a youth worker’s party summer camp in a mass shooting that lasted nearly ninety minutes. An hour before the bombing, Breivik emailed his manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, to more than 1,000 contacts, asking for their assistance in disseminating his magnum opus, which, according to him, took more than three years to complete. The 1,500-page compendium contained a litany of grievances and rails against political correctness, feminists, and “multiculturalist/cultural Marxists,” ultimately accusing them of complicity in a grand conspiracy orchestrated by political elites of the European Union and Arab states to destroy Western civilization through the gradual replacement of white Christian Europeans by way of increased Muslim immigration—in other words, a Great Replacement. Breivik’s actions that day would inspire a cascade of copycat attacks in the United States, New Zealand, and Germany. As part of their attacks, each perpetrator wrote a manifesto to explain the rationale for their actions. In doing so, the manifestos can–and often do–serve multiple purposes: air the personal and societal grievances that led them to kill, provide a blueprint for future attackers, and perhaps, most importantly, gain the public notoriety and infamy they so desperately crave. At its core, terrorism is an act of violence that seeks validation through its very nature as a public spectacle, and thus, manifestos can provide answers to the ever-present question of why an event of this magnitude occurs. While these attacks are separated from one another in both time and space, the ideological glue binding them together is the belief in a racially and culturally homogenous dystopian future, one in which white people gradually cease to comprise demographic majorities in traditionally white dominions such as the United States and Europe. Or, in the most dire circumstances, cease to exist at all. These manifestos contain several common themes central to replacement theory–the conspiracy that motivated their attacks. This paper attempts to build on the current body of academic literature that focuses on the thematic elements of the manifestos and the historical and theoretical foundations upon which the attackers’ justifications for their actions lie. Beginning with a detailed history of replacement sentiment in the United States and Europe, this section seeks to provide the necessary background and context for where replacement theory comes from and how it has motivated actors across time and space. Within the context of the United States, replacement theory finds its ideological roots in late-19th and early-20th century race science, or eugenics, beginning with the works of sociologist Edward A. Ross and anthropologist Madison Grant, both of whom popularized the notion of “race suicide.” Subsequent generations of post-war white supremacists, such as David Duke and David Lane, transformed race suicide into the explicitly anti-semitic conspiracy theory of “white genocide,” laying the groundwork for contemporary militant far-right extremists to coalesce around the idea of replacement theory. Meanwhile, European manifestations of parallel racist conspiracies emerged during an intellectual movement of the 1960s in France known as the Nouvelle Droite, championed by the likes of Jean Raspail. Raspail’s work would influence leading public figures such as Italian author Oriana Fallaci and British Historian Bat Ye’or, who were instrumental in sparking Renaud Camus’ coining of the “Great Replacement.”

Washington, DC: Program on Extremism at George Washington University , 2025. 32p.