This research article investigates Latin American cartels UAV usage, focusing on what cartels use UAVs for and who they target with their UAVs. Through theories of strategic bombing and coercion, by among others Pape and Schelling, cartels UAV use is explored both tactically, in terms of who they attack, and strategically, in terms of what cartels likely aim to achieve. Based on 44 documented incidents, the analysis indicates that cartels UAV operations serve both tactical and strategic coercive purposes aimed at instilling fear, forcing compliance, and shaping behaviour among civilian communities, cartel counterparts, and local and state governments. The findings show that cartels most frequently target civilians and private property, which distinguishes cartels from the majority of VNSAs in the Middle East. This underlines cartels hybrid of criminal and governance-oriented coercive intent, using UAVs for punishment, intimidation, and denial. The article recommends enhanced intelligence sharing on cartel UAV acquisition and operations, as well as exploring partnerships between intelligence and security services, law enforcement, on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in particular, to foster a more proactive response to cartels aerial operations.
This study investigates how discourse elements are transformed within Iran-Israel conflict using recontextualization strategy. While widely used across disciplines, this approach remains underexplored in analysing contemporary geopolitical conflicts involving political and religious framings. The 12-day Iran - Israel war and the broader Palestinian issue have generated competing narratives shaped by Sunni - Shia divisions. The study examines how Indonesian Sunni-affiliated preachers, some associated with Wahhabi orientations, construct discourses on the Iran - Israel conflict through YouTube sermons. Using a discourse-historical approach (DHA), the analysis distinguishes between conceptual, rhetorical, and linguistic dimensions of recontextualization. The findings show that historical narratives, Qur'anic references, religious interpretations, universal concepts, and eschatological frames are recontextualized to construct exclusionary representations that position Iran and its Shia-aligned groups outside the broader Islamic community. A further finding is that this recontextualization is not always expressed through explicit sectarian opposition, but often through universal humanitarian and anti-colonial discourse, which functions to reframe or partially obscure sectarian distinctions. Overall, the study highlights how ideological meanings are constructed through the strategic recontextualization of religious, historical, and political discourse elements.
The article examines estimates of enemy military deaths publicly released by combatants as political and media constructs. It shows that estimates of Ukrainian military casualties produced by the Russian Federation's Ministry of Defense and assessments of Russian military casualties made by Ukraine's Ministry of Defense were associated more strongly with political and media variables, such as the frequency of mentions of peace in the political leaders' war-related speeches and Internet users' interest in specific topics, than with the independently confirmed tallies of Russian soldiers' deaths. Official estimates of casualties were only selectively associated with the political leaders' preparedness to continue fighting, as measured using McClelland's human motivation theory. The association existed in the case of the U.S. presidency, but not in the case of Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin. The study was informed by time-series analysis and text mining. The outcomes of mining a unique quadrilingual corpus of political and media discourses on the war, containing 238 million words, were used as input in the ARIMA models, along with several other variables. The scope of the study includes five countries (Russia, Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France). It covers the period from January 2022 to August 2025.
Studies on the role of military service as a risk factor for violent extremism (VE) have focused almost exclusively on right-wing extremism (RWE) in the US context. However, it is possible that there is a more generalizable issue. Since 2020, there have been 78 documented cases of Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) engaging in terrorist attacks against Israel. By combining data from official sources, we estimate the risk of VE offending as a function of PASF service, and find it to be a significant risk factor for offending. We discuss both local and general implications of the findings.
This article examines the propaganda of the eco-extremist terrorist group Individualities Tending Toward Wildness (ITS) from a qualitative perspective. Unlike the classic paradigm that conceives of terrorism as a form of strategic communication aimed at mobilizing audiences or negotiating demands, ITS is characterized by the use of non-persuasive propaganda, which rejects any aspiration to convince or recruit. Its discourse is marked by nihilism, misanthropy, and contempt for any political framework. Through a chronological analysis of all propaganda documents published between 2011 and 2020, we demonstrate how the group uses violence and words to assert an identity antithetical to civilization. This form of expressive terrorism poses a challenge to radicalization prevention models.
Reintegrating those once affiliated with terrorism poses significant challenges. Yet a gap remains in interventions to improve public attitudes, due to a poor understanding of the rationale behind reintegration programmes and the need for greater receptiveness to discourage reoffending. This study makes an original contribution to empirically test the likelihood of a novel intervention called Prosociality, Empathy and Awareness Communication to aid rEintegration (PEACE) to improve attitude towards reintegration. A total of 70 participants were recruited and randomised into the experimental group, which received the PEACE intervention, or the waitlist control group. The study found that prior to the intervention, participants held negative views towards former rehabilitated Boko Haram members due to a perceived sense of injustice and alienation characterized by poor awareness of the government reintegration programme. However, participants in the experimental group who took part in the PEACE intervention demonstrated greater willingness to accept former rehabilitated prospective members back following awareness of the rationale behind the government reintegration program, while those in the control group's attitudes towards reintegration remained unchanged. The finding provides important insights into the significance of targeted media communication in improving attitudes towards reintegration relevant for policy globally and recommends a fully powered trial to determine the intervention's effectiveness in large populations.
The nexus between memory and archives is widely accepted. However, this is not yet true for the victims of mass killings known as Gukurahundi, which claimed over 20,000 lives in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces of Zimbabwe, given that, to date, no archives have been gathered towards the remembrance of Gukurahundi. Such dearth of Gukurahundi archives translates to denied remembrances of the darkest past in a post-independent Zimbabwe. Over 37 years post-Gukurahundi, no one knows the true nature, extent and whereabouts of Gukurahundi archives. The paper argues that the current absence of Gukurahundi archives as a voice that translates to latent power for the victims and survivors, instead of oblivion. Gukurahundi archives promote remembrance, historical-political conscience, restitution, scholarship, national healing and peacebuilding. The paper connects archives to collective memory, demonstrating how the prolonged absence of an organized and accessible Gukurahundi archive has created a memory lacune. It proposes community archiving for the memorialization of Gukurahundi, cultivating consciousness about the preservation of such materials for the benefit of the victims, the affected and the country at large, at the same time recognizing alternative forms of memorialization and archiving such as digital social spaces, artistic plays and artefacts.
Violent apocalyptic groups pose a unique problem to state actors because their actions can seem unpredictable. However, state actors can disrupt the apocalyptic narratives of these groups to decrease their legitimacy and ability to radicalize, recruit, and retain followers. Disrupting an apocalyptic narrative, or, in other words, causing a prophecy to fail, creates cognitive dissonance in a group's followers, reducing their leaders' ability to inspire acts of violence. I use case studies of four apocalyptic groups to analyze the efficacy of these disruptions. Branch Davidians, Islamic State (ISIS), QAnon, and The Seekers are, or were, apocalyptic groups according to Leon Festinger's classic definition. However, they differ in how closely their eschatology ties to their sacred texts, with ISIS closely aligned, QAnon and The Seekers unaligned, and Branch Davidians occupying the middle ground. I argue that the more literalist an approach a group takes, the more vulnerable it may be to narrative disruptions. I also consider whether a group views prophecy as predictive or prescriptive - in other words, do they wait to see prophecy fulfilled, or do they act to fulfil it themselves? I argue that groups with a prescriptive view of prophecy tend towards more aggressive actions.
This study is embedded within a broader interdisciplinary research framework examining the functions of writing under conditions of war and extreme deprivation. It is based on an analysis of letters written by Jews interned in the Drancy internment camp in France during the Occupation. The study draws on a corpus of 300 letters preserved at the M & eacute;morial de la Shoah. The analysis presented here reflects the contribution of one of the groups composed of psychologists and historians. Food emerged as a focal theme of the research because of its frequency in the corpus and its relevance for understanding how the external context of deprivation shaped the ways in which internees expressed their needs. The analysis highlights the multiple functions of food references, revealing variations in authors' intentions, modes of expression, and affective tone. These findings show that references to food operate not only as indicators of material deprivation, but also as key sites where biological need, emotions, and relational dynamics are negotiated through writing. Finally, this study opens methodological perspectives by suggesting avenues for further analysis of other themes within the corpus and for continued interdisciplinary exploration of writing as a psychological resource in contexts of internment and extreme violence.
Violent extremism is a significant threat to the international community. Many different types of individuals could become radicalized, and afterwards, they might support the development and execution of a violent plot to further some radical ideology. A prominent concern involves individuals with prior military experience engaging in violent extremism. Military experience presumably provides the knowledge and skills that would enable effective execution of a complicated violent plot. However, this assumption remains largely untested and may not hold true for several reasons, including the potential for civilians to acquire comparable skills through non-military sources. The current study utilized the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) database to examine differences in plot details between civilians, active-duty military, and veteran personnel. Analyses were divided into three primary areas: role within the plot, plot execution, and consequences. Results indicated that veterans were more likely to be leaders within radicalized plots, whereas active-duty personnel were more likely to be followers. Additionally, there were several differences regarding anticipated fatalities for radicalized behaviour between civilians, veterans, and active-duty service members. Taken together, this evidence provides several considerations for future work in preventing radicalization and understanding differences in radicalized behaviour due to military experience.
Persistent attacks by bandits in states across the country have compounded the security challenges with attendant negative implications on all aspects of social life. Despite the efforts of the government and other stakeholders in curtailing the social menace, all amounted to futility, with the bandits becoming more emboldened devising several means of evading apprehension. Therefore, the paper investigated conflict entrepreneurship and rural banditry in Nigeria. The entrepreneur disposition theory was adopted as a theoretical framework. The paper relied on the mixed method based on the use of survey which included the administration of questionnaire and interview. The study was analysed using ordinal regression analysis. It was revealed that the problem of rural banditry in the affected places and Nigeria at large seems impossible because conflict compradors who benefit from the activities of the bandits see it as a form of business investment. It further argued that the rising rate of unemployment and poverty in the state over time has led many youths into banditry industry. Therefore, the paper concluded that the approaches in making peace deal with the bandits in the state has encouraged arms dealers and Government at all levels must come up with reliable and dependable people-oriented policies and plans or programmes to unravel the basic needs of livelihood of the people in the country particularly, poverty reduction, employment creation, inclusiveness among others. Hence the paper recommended among others, that government should be intentional about concerned agencies undertaking different strategies towards dealing with banditry and establishing legitimacy.
Agenda-setting theory and warfare studies hold that setting the national agenda is strategically advantageous to foreign policy goals. We probe this theory on the Russo-Ukrainian War by analysing the conflicting agenda set by RIA Novosti, RT Russian, RT International, BBC News Russian, and BBC News from February 2022 to July 2023. In contrast to previous work that identified press coverage misalignment to be largely concentrated in the framing of events, our study provides evidence of substantive and sustained misalignment in the event selection by revealing that Russian state media tailored a specific version of the news for Russian-speaking audiences, often downplaying key developments of the conflict, such as the mobilization crisis in Russia, the Wagner group rebellion, the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and the prospect of nuclear escalation. Our results contribute to understanding how modern Russian propaganda has shaped the public perception of the invasion of Ukraine.
This article delves into the intricate relationships between two opposing ideological and religious factions: white supremacists and Black supremacists. It analyzes their respective characteristics and shared denominators, focusing on the pivotal role of antisemitism as a cohesive force. Additionally, the study explores the endeavours of white supremacists to mobilize Black supremacists against Jewish people, investigating the orchestrated campaigns and attempts to legitimize violence. By illuminating these dynamics, the article contributes to a deeper comprehension of the complexities within extremist movements and their strategies for advancing their agendas. Addressing gaps in current literature, it emphasizes (a) the connections between white supremacists and Black supremacists; (b) the significance of antisemitism as a unifying factor between these factions; (c) the collaboration between seemingly opposing groups; and (d) the potential ramifications of such alliances.
North American White supremacist/neo-Nazi accelerationist group The Base has become known for several high-profile arrests, hate crimes, and communication leaks. Among these leaks were 127 calls between members of The Base, including leader Rinaldo Nazzaro, and potential recruits. To understand the stated and implied motivations of the people seeking membership in the violent extremist group, how those were shaped, and unique and/or emergent elements of these conversations, we developed an analytic framework to evaluate these calls. This initial paper serves as part of our team's broader programmatic research into the motivations and selection processes involved in hate group recruitment. One of the goals of this research is to develop data-informed avenues for practitioners working to stem the appeal and recruitment of violent extremist organizations.
