This article presents findings on the occurrence and characteristics of so-called leaking in the lead-up to right-wing terrorist attacks in Germany between 2001 and 2019. The study draws on extensive analyses of judicial files from 17 cases of right-wing offenses, involving 44 perpetrators who collectively displayed 85 instances of leaking. Leaking is understood as statements or behaviors through which perpetrators announce or hint at their planned attack prior to carrying them out. Identifying such signals can be crucial for prevention and protective interventions against terrorism. The study investigates the frequency and nature of leaking, the intended recipients, the communication channels used, the witnesses involved, the trajectories of leaking behavior, and the responses it elicited. Additionally, it explores commonalities and differences between leakings by group-affiliated and lone actors.
This study examines the structure and internal dynamics of the trans-Tasman (Australia and New Zealand) extreme right between 2010 and 2022 using Social Network Analysis (SNA). Drawing on two unique datasets, it maps how the network evolved through interpersonal and organisational connections, and in response to both internal dynamics and external events, across three key timeframes. It identifies the actors occupying central (vanguard) positions and their capacity to shape ideological flow across the network. The analysis reveals a decentralised, but connected, movement characterised by persistent ideological fragmentation, factional competition, and shifting patterns of influence. Positioning Brenton Tarrant within this network, the study finds that although he occupied a peripheral but connected role with limited capacity to influence broader movement strategy prior to 2019, he was power-adjacent and possessed knowledge of the mechanisms of ideological dissemination and instruction within the network. However, relationship breakdown and factional infighting in the period 2017-2018 reduced Tarrant's ability to connect to the broader network and disseminate ideas through interpersonal channels. This study suggests that when pathways to influence within fragmented extremist networks are restricted, violence may emerge as an alternative mechanism for asserting influence.
This article contrasts political discourse on the threat posed by terrorism today from the US and UK. Three arguments are made. First, there is significant overlap in the characterisation of today's threat as more fragmented, more ideologically plural, less predictable, and potentially more dangerous than that which dominated the immediate post-9/11 period. Second, counterintuitively, this consistent framing of terrorism's recent transformation is situated within two very different constructions of terrorism's wider temporalities. In the UK, a model of historical discontinuity dominates in which today's terrorism is seen as radically different from the violences of the twentieth century and of the post-9/11 period. In the US, in contrast, a model of historical cyclicity sees contemporary terrorism positioned as a return to much older violences including those associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Third, these differences highlight the considerable political significance of constructed temporalities around terrorism, with their capacity to (de-)emphasise ostensibly pertinent similarities and differences, and to legitimise or foreclose policy responses to this threat.
Formed in 2020-2021, the Sadiku group is the extension to northwestern Nigeria of the jihad waged in the country's northeast by Jama'at Ahl al-Sunna li-Da'wa wal-Jihad (JASDJ), the outfit created by the late Abubakar Shekau and commonly known as Boko Haram. Sadiku's operation appears to be the most successful attempt at expansion outside the northeast by a Nigerian jihadist to date. Drawing on original interviews with his former associates, this study analyses Sadiku's relative success. A stranger in the northwest, a region dominated by bandits uninterested in jihadism, Sadiku showed remarkable flexibility in coopting local components: Darul Salam (a Salafi rejectionist group), the local-and mostly Christian-population, and bandits. Sadiku's experience confirms that all jihad is necessarily local: even with a portable ideology like Salafi-jihadism, insurgents require local associates and deals. Sadiku's "navigation" has been difficult, however, resulting in internal contradictions and tensions with the JASDJ core in the northeast as well as erstwhile bandit allies. Here we see the complexities of expansion: even in brutal sectarian organizations like JASDJ, the demands of local context can result in a degree of flexibility, but this, in turn, creates its own problems, undermining jihadists' religious self-perceptions and expectations.
The Daesh network is adaptive and resilient. When targeted by intelligence agencies, it evades detection through reactive evolutions in its structures and tactics, affording them an unprecedented ability to hide in plain sight. This has created a challenge for intelligence agencies who are engaged in an adversarial contest of innovation and reaction with this organisation. This paper develops a framework to conceptualise extremist activity on and through the Internet, via a continuum of four categories of activity: enabling, disruptive, destructive, and hybrid. This analytical framework is applied to the case of Daesh's "Virtual Caliphate," to better understand how the group exhibits these four categories of activity to maintain its resilience and secrecy. This paper examines Daesh as a revelatory case that highlights the broader dynamics of extremist adaptation in the cyber domain. The study finds that certain targeting methodologies may inadvertently foster adaptive resilience within this extremist network-by exposing operational vulnerabilities, potentially enabling it to develop more sophisticated countermeasures that increase the complexity of future detection and disruption activities. The study's novel contribution lies in applying an organisational capabilities framework. This study identifies future research opportunities for examining extremist networks' adaptive responses and its susceptibility to emerging intervention methodologies.
This study documents and analyses severe violence motivated by far-right beliefs occurring across Australia, Canada and New Zealand, with a specific focus on incidents perpetrated against Indigenous victims. It begins by briefly outlining the settler-colonial history of these locations, and notes the particularly vulnerable position that Indigenous communities occupy within these contemporary societies. Beginning from 1990, this paper then tracks fluctuations in both the frequency and nature of far-right violence occurring across time. It finds that targeting of the Indigenous community has occurred with sustained regularity within each of these contexts, and has also been particularly severe. Indeed, there are sufficient differences in attacks directed against Indigenous people, from more general understandings of contemporary far-right violence, that such incidents should be analysed and responded to separately. Yet despite being one of the primary victims of far-right violence, Indigenous voices remain completely absent from counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism efforts.
