Transnational Dynamics in Violent Outcomes for Protest Movements: A Rapid Evidence Assessment
- Movement schism and fragmentation may increase potential for violence.
- Exposure to misinformation influences protest dynamics in ways which can increase the danger of violent escalation.
- The potential for counter-messaging to be counter-productive by producing unintended effects like reinforcing commitment to pre-existing positions, enhancing grievances like perceived discrimination, and reinforcing identities.
- Digital platforms play a role in forging collective identities, including or especially transnational ones.
- Fringe political movements are associated with increased acceptance of political violence.
- Identity fusion, especially in relation to perceived threats against a group, increases the salience of group identity and individual commitment to actions in support or defense of the group, even at cost to the individual.
- Perceptions of existential threats, discrimination, collective angst, and shared grievances can intensify group identity.
The social movement literature has developed a significant body of work on transnational movements. The key insights from the social movement and interdisciplinary literature on violence and protests also help to interpret cross-border influences. Transnational perspectives primarily add another layer of interaction, mutual influence, and opportunities for resource sharing and mobilization. However, the mediating factors that influence contemporary social movement mobilizations, including new technology and the role of social media and their influence on violence have received less attention. This is particularly the case when violence is informed by local events and dynamics, but is influenced by transnational actors and processes. This suggests a broader gap to be filled by future research on the questions outlined in this report.
Core findings with specific focus on transnational movements include the following:
Transnational protest movements are becoming increasingly diffuse, partly in response to the increased role of social media and online interactions between strangers. Both highly diffuse and segmented identitarian movements have an important role in the radicalization of individuals and groups across a wide spectrum of movements. These are often “civilizational”, religious, or gender-based identities that do not refer to the state and which may organize themselves as “anti-systemic” movements.
The key — and novel — role played by rapidly evolving online platforms in diffusing transnational movements means that local conflicts or protests are increasingly vulnerable to being inflamed by transnational actors: immigration, anti-Muslim and economic themes seem most vulnerable to transnational influence.
The mediating mechanisms that make these interactions possible are evolving rapidly, creating complex new “webs of influence” that are only beginning to be mapped and understood.
Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment are the most resonant issues for far-right groups, and anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim protests have been most frequently violent over the last quarter of a century across Europe.
Strong evidence indicates that some states, and state-aligned movements, play roles in influencing transnational movements: they attempt to mobilize or radicalize local movements, or to accelerate peaceful protest movements toward violent confrontation. The evidence is mixed in the literature on actors like Iran, but stronger on Russia, which has developed a set of policies for liaising with local groups in what Rekawek and Molas call “political warfare” (Rekawek and Molas 2024). Evidence of their success in achieving that influence is mixed, preliminary, and largely anecdotal.
Synthesized evidence from the review partially supports the widely held hypothesis that mis- and disinformation played important roles in some recent episodes of violent protests with a transnational element, although not all. Available evidence supports the role of mis- and disinformation in violent escalation during the Charlottesville mobilization in 2017 and the Capital Riots in 2021 in the United States, as well as the unrest in Leicester primarily between British Hindus and British Muslims in 2022, and violent mobilizations following the attack by Axel Rudakubana in 2024 in Southport, UK. However, this evidence is preliminary and often falls outside the ordinary scope of the review as it is found in grey literature or in adjacent fields. The review did not find evidence that mis- or disinformation played a catalyzing role in violence related to other major protests, such as the Yellow Vest movement in France to antiwar or anti-globalization protests.
Key recommendations:
- Prioritize violence prevention efforts toward anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim mobilizations; ensure that public messaging and discourse does not contribute to dehumanization.
- Support research and knowledge building with a focus on transnational actors seeking to inflame existing grievances within the UK, especially work that captures multiple platforms and reflects webs-of-influence, including non-English content.
- Address core grievances exploited by malign actors, including economic inequality, barriers to socioeconomic advancement, and perceived inequalities of access to full citizenship, rights, and belonging.
- Focus attention on Russian and other hostile state actors’ influence operations online and off, both in the UK and beyond.
- Support social media companies’ efforts to identify and remove disinformation, actors promoting violence, and enhance mechanisms to combat misinformation.
- Enhance protections from transnational repression for protected speech, beliefs, and human rights.
- Avoid repressive and militarized policing methods that reduce the space for lawful protest, particularly in the context of mobilizations seeking social or political change within existing liberal democratic structures.
- Increase opportunities for peaceable, democratic engagement with political systems.
- Carefully consider the most appropriate way of responding to splits and movement fragmentation whilst reducing the potential for violent radical flanks to develop.
- Consider the implications of state repression overseas, and the potential for this to diffuse across contexts to understand the likelihood of escalatory violence between protesters and state actors.
- Pay attention to the potential for violence where perceptions of threat and discrimination coincide with real-world violence, including violence perpetrated overseas.
The full report provides a detailed breakdown of results, organized into four broad themes: internal dynamics, external influences, mechanisms of influence, and interaction effects. While each research question overlaps these categories, this structure helps clarify the range of factors shaping transnational protest–extremism dynamics.
The in-depth findings are summarized in the main report using tables adapted from the EMMIE framework, capturing the strength and direction of evidence, the mechanisms and mediators at play, and the contextual factors that shape outcomes.
Full detail, including the categorized findings and evidence tables, can be found in the main report.
References
Peterscheck, A., Marsden, S., & Salman, N. (2025). Individual-level perspectives on mobilization and radicalization: A rapid evidence assessment.
Salman, N., Marsden, S., & Lewis, J. (2024). Social movement theory perspectives on group mobilization, radicalization, and violent extremism: A rapid evidence assessment.
Rekawek, K., & Molas, B. (2024). Introduction: Russia’s ‘political warfare’ via the far-right. In K. Rekawek, B. Molas, & T. Renard (Eds.), Russia and the Far-Right: Insights from Ten European Countries. The Hague: ICCT. https://doi.org/10.19165/2024.1563
Noah Tucker is senior research consultant for the Oxus Society and a program associate at George Washington University’s Central Asia Program. He also holds the Handa Studentship at the Handa Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland). Sarah Marsden is Director of CSPTV, School of International Relations, the University of St. Andrews. Nadine Salman is a Research Fellow currently based at the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews. This article is published courtesy of the Center for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST).
