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TERRORISM
It is notoriously difficult to work out how and why someone becomes a terrorism risk. But in our research, we’ve started to identify important patterns when it comes to different journeys into extremist offending. Most notably, we’ve found that in recent years, people who go on to be convicted of terrorist offenses are far more likely to have been radicalized online – without any offline interactions at all – than was the case in the past.
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COUNTERTERRORISM
The Situational Threat and Response Signals (STARS) project responds to the challenge of how to communicate effectively with the public about terrorism risks and threats in an increasingly complex and fragmented information environment.
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TERRORISM
A Libyan intelligence operative suspected of making the bomb that blew up a U.S. passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 has been arrested by the FBI and is being extradited to the United States to stand trial.
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ARGUMENT: EXTREMISM
With Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes convicted of seditious conspiracy, the group he founded is at a crossroads. Sam Jackson writes that the conviction is creating disarray in the group’s ranks, but that other so-called Patriot movements might benefit, and that the overall cause will remain strong.
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EXTREMISM
Incidents of antisemitism targeting Jewish institutions remain at historic levels in the United States, jumping 61 percent from 2020 to 2021. There has also been an uptick in threats to Jewish community and religious spaces, including synagogues, JCCs and Jewish day schools.
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EXTREMISM
Police are searching for more people connected to the far-right Reichsbürger movement after Germany-wide raids revealed the advanced scale of a plot to overthrow the government.
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EXTREMISM
Police have arrested 25 people of the Reichsbürger movement, accusing them of planning to overthrow the German government in a series of raids across the country. Reichsbürger adherents have been stopped from attempting violent action before, but this latest incident and its alleged members have caused greater concern.
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THREAT SPECTRUM
What are the major threats the world is facing? Researchers highlight five such threats: The growing role of disinformation; attacks on the idea of democracy; environmental challenges; economic instability; and terrorism – both domestic and foreign.
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COUNTERTERRORISM
Many counterterrorism experts and observers have long said that one of the key failings of the post-9/11 era was a lack of a cohesive, overarching strategic concept. Research indicates that short-term operational and tactical planning can dominate policy and security risk management at the expense of future scenario planning.
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BIOTHREATS
COVID-19 demonstrated how the world is clearly vulnerable to the introduction of a single pandemic virus with a comparatively low case fatality rate. The deliberate and simultaneous release of many pandemic viruses across travel hubs could threaten the stability of civilization. Current trends suggest that within a decade, tens of thousands of skilled individuals will be able to access the information required for them single-handedly to cause new pandemics.
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AFGHANISTAN
A report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which examined the U.S. investment in the conflict-torn nation, blames Afghanistan’s internationally supported, now-defunct government for failing to recognize that the United States intended to withdraw from the country, one of several factors contributing to its rapid collapse in August 2021 before the Taliban seized power.
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TERRORISM
“The greatest terrorism threat to our Homeland is posed by lone actors or small cells who typically radicalize to violence online and look to attack soft targets with easily accessible weapons,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told Lawmakers. “We see these threats manifested within both Domestic Violent Extremists (“DVEs”) and Homegrown Violent Extremists (“HVEs”), two distinct threats, both of which are located primarily in the United States and typically radicalize and mobilize to violence on their own.”
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CONSPIRACY THEORIES
As a study my team and I conducted highlights, frightening proportions of the public believe in conspiracy theories that doubt the truth of reported events, even terrorist attacks. In our findings, one in seven respondents believed victims of the May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing were not really victims at all, but “crisis actors” – essentially, that they were brought in to pretend to be victims of an attack to manipulate public opinion. We also found that one in 20 were convinced the attack in Manchester and the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005 were “hoaxes”.
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BIOSAFETY
Many countries face an severe shortages of biosafety and biosecurity professionals. To address these shortages, experts call for a multisectoral effort toward a future sustainable workforce by formalizing a biosafety & biosecurity career path within the higher education system.
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SOFT-TARGET PROTECTION
Anyone who has ever gone to a major sporting event or concert, taken public transportation, even visited a farmer’s market on a brisk weekend morning, has likely benefitted from soft-target physical security—and perhaps didn’t even know it. DHS S&T is working developing a suite of decision-support software known as Special Event Planning Tools (SEPT) to help those in charge of securing soft targets.
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CONSPIRACY THEORIES
The vast majority of the public accept the reality of terrorist attacks in the U.K.– but notable minorities say they struggle to know what to believe or think we don’t have the full picture. A hardcore minority of one in 11 people can be classed as strong believers in conspiracy theories.
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COUNTERTERRORISM
In the U.K. and overseas, there has been a shift towards self-initiated terrorists operating independently from organized groups with increasingly personal ideologies and warped views used to justify violence. The U.K. is updating its counterterrorism system is so it can continually adapt to new and emerging threats.
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ARGUMENT: TACKLING DOMESTIC TERRORISM
The recently released intelligence assessment of domestic terrorism is the second iteration of the Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism, and Seamus Hughes, Moshe Klein, and Alexis Jori Shanes write that “From additional granularity in the size and scope of the threat of domestic terrorism to a more forthcoming acknowledgement of its complexity, it should provide a road map for U.S. domestic counterterrorism efforts.”
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AI & EXTREMISM
Recent large-scale projects in the field of Artificial Intelligence have dramatically improved the quality of language models, unfolding a wide range of practical applications. Language models are statistical models that calculate probability distributions over sequences of words. Language models can make many beneficial contributions, but they may also be misused by extremist actors for propaganda purposes.
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EXTREMISM
A 75-year old retired theology professor was arrested and charged with organizing a nationalist, far-right terrorist group aiming to bring back the Kaiser. The group aimed to attack power stations and transmitters in order to plunge large parts of Germany into black out in the hope of promoting civic unrest.
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The long view
Southport Attacks: Why the U.K. Needs a Unified Approach to All Violent Attacks on the Public
The conviction of Axel Rudakubana for the murder of three young girls in Southport has prompted many questions about how the UK handles violence without a clear ideological motive. This case has also shown up the confusion in this area, and made clear the need for a basic reframing of how we understand murderous violence against the public today.
Mis- and Disinformation Trends and Tactics to Watch in 2025
Predicting how extremists may weaponize false narratives requires an understanding of the strategies that allow them to spread most effectively.
Evidence-Based Solutions to Protect Against Mass Attacks
Mass attacks like the New Year’s Day incident in New Orleans stir public emotion and have tragic consequences. While the investigations into this case will take time, we know from our work that there are things law enforcement and the public can do to mitigate and perhaps stop mass casualty events.