Blog

Women and the Far Right: The Challenge to Gender Equality

Far-right extremist groups have been receiving increasing attention in the media and from policymakers, as concern grows about their interaction with anti-governmental sentiment. This article looks at how far-right ideology and anti-feminism are intertwined, as well as how such ideologies can appeal to women. One aspect of interest is the increasing number of women functioning […]

(Non) Violent Extremism Trends and Prevention: Research and Fieldwork Challenge

This piece analyses the main challenges encountered during the ‘Countering Radicalisation through Lifestories’ research project – which ran from 2016 to 2019 and involved the collection of roughly 300 interviews – and provides mitigation strategies that researchers could employ while engaging in collecting empirical data. The region analysed as part of this project was South Eastern Europe, […]

No Prevention without Representation: Jihadism and Right Wing Terrorism in EU Prevention Policy

Existing work on the development of responses to extremist violence notes a widespread international turn towards favouring Prevention/Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) initiatives over police-based counter-terrorism (Tsui, 2020). But in 2022, Prevention is phasing out of its decade-long obsession with ISIS. Indeed, new primary and tertiary prevention programmes are increasingly focused on an emerging contender: right-wing terrorism […]

Religious ideas in civil war mobilisation

One of the prevailing questions in the field of extremism and radicalisation is the role of religious beliefs[1] in the mobilisation towards violence. How are religious ideas and violence connected? And, are religious ideas more prone to inspiring violence compared to other ideologies? Generally, scholars agree that religious beliefs can impact mobilisation processes, but that […]

How big is the threat of ‘lone-wolf terrorism’ in Britain?

The first author of this piece is Jacob Astley, an Honorary Research Assistant at the University of Liverpool Shortly before 11am on Sunday 14th November 2021, a day intended to be one of peaceful reflection and remembrance, ended before commemorations could begin in Liverpool, when a homemade bomb was exploded inside a taxi outside the […]

Meet the Team: Dr Laura Zahra McDonald

This third interview in the series of Meet The Team with DRIVE members features Dr. Laura Zahra McDonald, who is a founding director of ConnectFutures, an independent civil society organisation based in the UK, that works with young people, communities and professionals to prevent violence, extremism and exploitation. "The social, political and personal implications of […]

Meet the Team: Dr. Mark Sedgwick

This second interview in the series of Meet The Team with DRIVE members features Dr. Mark Sedgwick, who is the Principle Investigator at Aarhus University. As a Principal Investigator for the DRIVE Project, what perspectives are you bringing to the project? I originally trained as a historian, and I think this still has a lot […]

When is a terrorist organisation not a terrorist organisation?

Should those inspired to undertake acts of violence by Incel culture be considered terrorists? Indeed, should the Incel network itself be classified as a terrorist organisation?

Meet the Team: Prof. Tahir Abbas

How is a Horizon 2020 project conducted? Who are the professionals working on DRIVE and which perspectives do they bring to the project? In this series of interviews, you will get to meet the team members of DRIVE and learn more about their areas of expertise and the role they play throughout the course of the project.

Inclusion into what? Rethinking Islam, race and space in Europe

How can we understand the complex entanglement of Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe and what does that tell us about the idea of “inclusion”?

England at the Euros: How Racism, not Football, was always ‘Coming Home’

How can we understand the violence and racism that followed the England football team’s exit from the European Championship?

The DRIVE launch event on the challenges of researching extremism today: vital impressions

What are the key challenges in researching extremism? Insights from five experts from the field during the first DRIVE workshop.

The Third Position on Far Right and Islamist Extremism

Far right and Islamist politics are mutually dependent in the shared displacement of 'the Muslim' For some time now, I have been trying to make sense of the process by which a particular representation of the figure of ‘the Muslim’ is intrinsically entangled in Islamist and far right politics.[1] The prevalence of the Muslim ‘other’ […]

Critiquing Countering Violent Extremism

From 2016 to 2019, in thinking through this topic further, first as a senior researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in Whitehall in London looking after the CVE portfolio for a period before joining the Institute in 2018, I was taken aback at the lack of contextualisation of radicalisation, the long-standing issues that stem […]