• Twenty Years After 9/11, the U.S. Needs a Better Strategy to Prevent and Counter Violent Extremism

    With his announcement to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, President Joe Biden is delivering on his promise to bring an end to the “forever wars” that were the defining features of what began as the “Global War on Terrorism” two decades ago. Eric Rosand writes that “The global terrorist threat today is qualitatively different than it was 20 years ago,” and, “therefore, the strategy for addressing it must reflect that change.”

  • Understanding 21st-Century Militant Anti-Fascism

    Anti-fascist militancy has existed for as long as fascism has, but militant anti-fascism is still largely neglected across both academic and policy-practitioner communities.A new study says that there is a need for a more robust, evidence-based understanding of the antifa phenomenon, especially in a context where militant anti-Fascist protest in the United States has been conflated with “domestic terrorism.”

  • Displaced Conflict: Russia’s Qualified Success in Combatting Insurgency

    By Mark Youngman and Cerwyn Moore

    In both Syria and the North Caucasus, Russia claims success in fighting insurgency and terrorism, offering itself as a model of best practice. Closer examination, however, shows that this “success” carries major caveats and is more illusory than it first appears.

  • France Arrests Seven Former Red Brigades Members

    French police on Wednesday arrested seven Italian nationals who members of the leftist Red Brigades terrorist group which terrorized Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the group’s more spectacular crimes was the kidnapping and murder of a former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro.

  • QAnon Poses a Threat to U.S. National Security: Report

    The QAnon movement poses a threat to U.S. national security, concludes a new report by the Soufan Center. Although commonly perceived as a domestic movement within the U.S., the data suggests that foreign states are utilizing the QAnon conspiracy theory to sow societal discord and even compromise legitimate political processes.

  • DHS Announces Domestic Violent Extremism Review at DHS

    DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Monday announced an internal review to address the threat of domestic violent extremism within DHS. A cross-departmental working group comprising senior officials will begin a comprehensive review of how to best prevent, detect, and respond to threats related to domestic violent extremism within DHS. 

  • U.S. Antisemitic Incidents Remained at Historic High in 2020

    Antisemitic incidents remained at a historically high level   across the United States in 2020, with a total of 2,024 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism. While antisemitic incidents declined by 4 percent after hitting an all-time high in 2019, last year was still the third-highest year for incidents against American Jews since 1979.

  • A Jan. 6 Commission is Crucial to Understand the Reality of the Attack, and the Alternate Reality of the Attackers

    A dangerous rift currently exists in the public perception of Jan. 6 – a rift that may have grave implications for the future of American democracy, Fadi Quran and Justin Hendrix write. Polls show that a small majority of Republicans continues to believe in the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen due to widespread election fraud, and that there were left-wing infiltrators who were responsible for the violence at the Capitol. Why does it matter that such voters believe in these untruths? Because, as the unclassified version of a report on the threat posed by domestic extremism from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) suggests, “narratives of fraud in the recent general election” may well contribute to an increase in future violence.

  • Students Collaborate to Solve Homeland Security Challenges

    In the parlance of homeland security, soft targets are places that are easily accessible to the general public and relatively unprotected. Last month, innovative students from Arizona State University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas competed in “Hardening Soft Targets” – a DHS-sponsored 3-day event in which students worked directly with experts from DHS, the Phoenix Police Department, industry leaders, and academics.

  • Domestic Violent Extremists’ Threat Has Increased Since 2015: Intelligence Chiefs

    Last week, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines released to Congress an unclassified annual report – the IC’s 2021 Annual Threat Assessment. DNI Avril Haines, CIA director Bill Burns, and FBI director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. “DVE [domestic violent extremists] is an increasingly complex threat that is growing in the United States …. These extremists often see themselves as part of a global movement and, in fact, a number of other countries are experiencing a rise in DVE,” Haines said.

  • Belfast Tinderbox: Why Loyalists Are in the Streets This Spring

    The violence that broke out in Northern Ireland earlier this month raised fears that sectarian conflict would return after decades of uneasy peace. Carolyn Gallaher and Kimberly Cowell-Meyers write that the latest unrest draws on many of the players during the so-called “Troubles” but that today’s politics, particularly disputes over Brexit, are driving much of the violence.

  • “I Felt Hate More Than Anything”: How an Active Duty Airman Tried to Start a Civil War

    By Gisela Pérez de Acha, Kathryn Hurd, and Ellie Lightfoot

    Steven Carrillo, a 32-year-old Air Force sergeant, wanted to incite a second Civil War in the United States by killing police officers he viewed as enforcers of a corrupt and tyrannical political order — officers he described as “domestic enemies” of the Constitution he professed to revere. Carrillo’s path to the Boogaloo Bois shows the extremist anti-government group is far more organized and dangerous than previously known.

  • “Deprogramming” QAnon Followers Ignores Free Will and Why They Adopted the Beliefs in the First Place

    By Paul Thomas

    Recent calls to deprogram QAnon conspiracy followers are steeped in discredited notions about brainwashing. As popularly imagined, brainwashing is a coercive procedure that programs new long-term personality changes. Deprogramming, also coercive, is thought to undo brainwashing. Such deprogramming conversations do little to help us understand why people adopt QAnon beliefs. A deprogramming discourse fails to understand religious recruitment and conversion and excuses those spreading QAnon beliefs from accountability.

  • Afghanistan Withdrawal Could Pose ‘Significant Risk’ to U.S.: Intelligence Officials

    By Jeff Seldin

    The plan to pull troops from Afghanistan could give terrorist groups like al-Qaida and Islamic State a chance to regenerate the capabilities they would need to carry out an attack against the United States, according to top U.S. intelligence officials.

  • After the Islamic State: Social Media and Armed Groups

    The Islamic State is often credited with pioneering the use of social media in conflict, having created a global brand that drew between 20,000 and 40,000 volunteers from at least 85 countries. Social media served as a key recruiting tool, source of fundraising, and platform for disseminating graphic propaganda to a global audience. Laura Courchesne and Brian McQuinn write that the Islamic State perfected tactics and strategies already widely used by hundreds of other armed groups.