Jihadi video and auto-radicalisation: evidence from an exploratory YouTube study

Large amounts of jihadi video content on YouTube along with the vast array of relational data that can be gathered opens up innovative avenues for exploration of the support base for political violence. This exploratory study analyses the online supporters of jihad-promoting video content on YouTube, focusing on those posting and commenting upon martyr-promoting material from Iraq. Findings suggest that a majority are under 35 years of age and resident outside the region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with the largest percentage of supporters located in the United States. Evidence to support the potential for online radicalisation is presented. Findings relating to newly formed virtual relationships involving a YouTube user with no apparent prior links to jihadists are discussed

What’s love got to do with it? Framing ‘JihadJane’ in the US press

The purpose of this article is to compare and contrast the US press coverage accorded to female terrorist plotter, Colleen LaRose, with that of two male terrorist plotters in order to test whether assertions in the academic literature regarding media treatment of women terrorists stand up to empirical scrutiny. The authors employed TextSTAT software to generate frequency counts of all words contained in 150 newspaper reports on their three subjects and then slotted relevant terms into categories fitting the commonest female terrorist frames, as identified by Nacos’s article in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (2005). The authors’ findings confirm that women involved in terrorism receive significantly more press coverage and are framed vastly differently in the US press than their male counterparts

Combining social network analysis and sentiment analysis to explore the potential for online radicalisation

The increased online presence of jihadists has raised the possibility of individuals being radicalised via the Internet. To date, the study of violent radicalisation has focused on dedicated jihadist websites and forums. This may not be the ideal starting point for such research, as participants in these venues may be described as “already madeup minds”. Crawling a global social networking platform, such as YouTube, on the other hand, has the potential to unearth content and interaction aimed at radicalisation of those with little or no apparent prior interest in violent jihadism. This research explores whether such an approach is indeed fruitful. We collected a large dataset from a group within YouTube that we identified as potentially having a radicalising agenda. We analysed this data using social network analysis and sentiment analysis tools, examining the topics discussed and what the sentiment polarity (positive or negative) is towards these topics. In particular, we focus on gender differences in this group of users, suggesting most extreme and less tolerant views among female users

The challenge of community participation in the delivery of public services exploring local participatory governance in Ireland

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“By the People, for the People” Bringing public participation back to politics

International best practice dictates that policies impacting people should be evidence-based, and that those most affected are in the best position to explain the needs that effective policies have to meet. The problem is that people outside academia rarely get to contribute to research, and (apart from opinion surveys) policy makers find it hard to understand people’s true needs when they formulate policy. Researchers in UL’s Department of Politics and Public Administration have addressed this problem by developing participatory frameworks for public policy design. Working in collaboration with politicians, policy makers, community groups and citizens, UL researchers have found ways to collect the evidence needed by state agencies, politicians and policy makers to target policy interventions and resources precisely where people most need them. In effect, UL’s researchers have become translators between officialdom and citizens, helping create collaborative partnerships that provide for robust evidence-based policy making. These partnerships marshal the insights and inputs of all policy stakeholders, and result in policy that is more effective for all

From exclusion to inclusion? Reflections on the Celtic tiger

International (Considine & Giguere 2008) and Australian (Smyth, Reddel & Jones 2005) interest in the place of associations and partnerships to create more inclusive governance forms continues unabated. In this paper we trace the evolution of Irish partnership approaches by providing a brief summary of ‘flagship’ partnership initiatives and the primary influences that led to their creation. In doing so, we note that there were a variety of external and internal impetuses towards partnership— at European, national and sub-national levels of government—which manifested themselves in different partnership projects at these different levels. As a result, despite sharing many common attitudes and approaches, these partnership initiatives inevitably reflected different policy aims and ambitions. The consequences for changes to Irish governmental systems were twofold. On the one hand, the fact that partnership was simultaneously promoted in a variety of government levels and policy arenas meant that its impact was widely felt across the system. On the other hand, this widespread experience of partnership served to reinforce a broader paradigm shift in organisation of public policy (which has subsequently been interpreted as an attitudinal and value shift in favour of partnership). As a result we argue that it is possible to conceive of the institutionalising of partnership approaches. Still, this institutionalisation is a process whereby we are seeing a gradual convergence of various partnership approaches into one generalised model. We argue that this convergence (the one partnership approach fits all), while simplifying governance arrangements, raises significant concerns regarding the efficacy and legitimacy of new governance approaches which themselves may prove counter-productive to the original aims of partnership