On the Friday before last, the Prime Minister and State and Territory leaders unanimously agreed on another expansion of Australia’s counter-terrorism powers. The proposed law would keep convicted terrorists, if they were deemed to be un-rehabilitated, detained after their sentences have been served.

The following Friday saw another news report on counter-terrorism legislation. The Australian reported on how decisions to revoke the citizenship of dual-national suspected terrorists (based on legislation passed in December) would be made.

The government has created a Citizenship Loss Board, which includes members of “ASIO, ASIS, the Australian Federal Police and a raft of bureaucracies, including the ­Attorney-General’s Department, the Immigration Department and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade”. According the report, the government is prioritising Islamic State (IS) members believed to be intending to return to Australia, but has still “cast the net as wide as possible”. It is currently unclear what role the judiciary will have.

These two reports, within the last fortnight, caused little controversy. But they demonstrate the illiberal trend that marked Australia’s counter-terrorism approach under the Abbott government, and which has become normalised under the Turnbull government.

Under Abbott, jihadist terrorism was portrayed as an unprecedented danger that required a constant rush of new laws. From September 2014 onwards, the government declared every few months that many of Australia’s counter-terrorism laws were inadequate and soft, and that new laws to increase the power of security agencies were needed.

To be clear, there are exceptional aspects to terrorism when compared to most other types of crime. These include:

• the harm that one single major attack can do, in the form of mass deaths and injuries, enormous economic damage and dramatic political consequences;
• the expectations on security agencies to intercept plotters and prevent attacks rather than just investigate attacks after they occur;
• the transnational conflict aspect, whereby the terrorists are often inspired, assisted or directed by sub-state military entities at war with our society.

These aspects make some departures from traditional crime-fighting approaches justified, provided they are effective, proportionate, and consistent with human rights.

But most of these adjustments were already made a decade ago, with the legislative framework put in place by the Howard government after 9/11.

This older legislation did have problems, in that some parts went too far and others were unnecessarily complex. That was an unsurprising outcome of so much legislation being pushed through Parliament in such a short time (one international observer described Australia’s approach as “hyper-legislation”). But several of its core components were necessary and justified.

Measures such as passport confiscation, ASIO’s compulsory questioning powers, proscription of organisations and the criminalisation of preparatory activity for terror attacks, proved useful for Australia’s counter-terrorism efforts. Reviews by Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, and an independent review established by the Council of Australian Governments, judged these particular measures to be effective and appropriate. The jury is still out on some of the other measures introduced in that period, such as control orders.

So Australia already had a robust counter-terrorism regime. There was scope for changing some of the laws, given the evolving threat, changes in technology, and some of the shortcomings identified in the independent reviews. As the potential threat resulting from the Syrian conflict was apparent from at least 2012, there was an ideal moment for careful deliberation on how Australia could best adjust its laws.

Instead, there was little action at all until June 2014 (when IS seized Mosul and declared a “Caliphate”) and then we got another round of “hyper-legislation” in the form of constant tranches of new legislation.

With at least five tranches passed so far, Australia has a greatly expanded body of national security laws. Some of these measures were sensible and justified (fast-tracked passport confiscations, increasing ASIS’s ability to spy on Australian terror suspects overseas, allowing “special intelligence operations”), some were unjust (citizenship-stripping, no-go zones, the excessive media restrictions in the “special intelligence operations” legislation), and some were ambiguous (lowered thresholds on a range of existing powers like control orders). But regardless of where one stands on each specific law, it is clear that all the changes went in one direction.

They all involved increases in government power, explicitly at the expense of liberty.

This approach, of treating the terror threat as so exceptional that more and more departures from traditional rules of evidence and rights protections were constantly needed, was accompanied by apocalyptic rhetoric. While such rhetoric has been a feature of Australian security politics for over a century, it reached a remarkable level under the Abbott Government. Attorney-General George-Brandis described the threat as existential, while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop likened it to the Soviet Union.

The whole approach contributes to a wider polarisation. For some small parts of the community, this approach risks feeding fears that the current threat of al-Qaeda and IS-inspired terrorism is a catastrophic and unmanageable problem, contributing to the backlash against multiculturalism. For other small sections of the community, it risks feeding fears that terrorism is a phoney threat manufactured to increase state power and smear Muslims. Rather than facing the threat with calmness and unity, it encourages fear and unnecessary division.

When Malcolm Turnbull came to power, his rhetoric signalled a different approach. He did not portray the threat as catastrophic or frame it in a way that risked implicating Muslims collectively. His rhetoric acknowledged the seriousness of the threat but projected optimism about overcoming it.

However, even the inclusive language is under challenge, and the “hyper-legislation” approach has barely slowed down.

The news reports over the last fortnight, of potential indefinite detention post-sentence and the creation of the Citizenship Loss Board, show how normalised this type of law-making has become. Other ideas suggested by Federal and State politicians have included secret trials and 28-day detention without charge. With Federal MP Andrew Nikolic (who is now Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security) having declared after the Paris attacks that civil liberties debates were now “redundant”, it looks like Australia will keep steadily heading down this path.

Following on from my post on internal assessments of terrorism studies, this is a short post to introduce readers to critiques of the field, and some thoughts on where I stand myself.

There are four common types of critique, which are:

• Left-wing critiques: These portray terrorism studies as uncritically accepting Western state priorities and assumptions, and consequently producing flawed analysis. See this example from Richard Jackson (or this shorter one).
• Right-wing critiques: These portray terrorism research as forms of terrorist apologia or as attempts to push a ‘politically correct’ agenda. See this example from David Martin Jones and Carl Ungerer.
• Policy-utility critiques: These contend that terrorism research rarely provides workable ideas for counter-terrorism policymakers and practitioners, and that academics just prefer to criticise rather than offer helpful suggestions. See this example from Mils Hills.
• Methodological critiques: These contend that terrorism research usually lacks empirical rigour, and that it is theoretically under-developed and full of conceptual confusion. See many examples in this article by Lisa Stampnitzky.

The political critiques (‘political’ not in the pejorative sense but in the sense of being concerned with politics of such research and its potential impact on people’s lives) are widespread, and anyone researching in the area will regularly encounter them. In their worst variants, the political critiques mean that terrorism studies gets slammed as either a haven for right-wing academic frauds who have sold their souls to state power to demonise official enemies, or as a haven for left-leaning namby-pamby academics who would rather hug terrorists than have them be defeated. This is best seen in the rage that the Brookings Institution’s Will McCants generates from such opposing types such as Glenn Greenwald and Robert Spencer.

In their stronger variants, these political critiques need to be reflected on and engaged with.

My own position is not neutral; I don’t find both sides to be equivalent. Instead, I find some variants of the leftist critiques compelling. It’s certainly true that the field mainly focuses on groups that threaten Western countries. I disagree quite a lot with the work of Arun Kundnani, particularly Chapter 4 of his latest book (the field focuses far less on religious ideology as a causal factor for terrorism than you would expect from his writings), but everyone in the field should read it. These types of critique are particularly important because they often come from members of communities subjected to stigmatisation and harmful policies in the name of countering terrorism.

I find the right-wing critiques weaker, which is likely a result of my own politics tending to be centre-left liberal. But there’s been some times when I’ve found the right-wing critiques to hit the mark. For example, some scholarship on Hezbollah has indeed indulgently accepted their denials of involvement in terrorism.

I’m sympathetic to the policy-utility critiques, but am also wary of the risks of imposing narrow conceptions of policy-relevance on academia.

And last, I agree a lot with the methodological critiques, as would much of the field. As noted in my post on internal assessments, the emerging dominant view is that the field has dramatically improved in the past five to ten years, but that we definitely have a long way to go.

Update 1: Changed the Mervyn Bendle example to one by David Martin Jones and Carl Ungerer, on 5 April 2016.

The new Defence White Paper describes Australia as entering a more unpredictable and potentially more dangerous world. It frequently mentions terrorism, almost twice as much as earlier White Papers do, as a worrying element in Australia’s strategic outlook:

Events during the three years since the release of the last Defence White Paper in 2013 demonstrate how rapidly Australia’s security environment can change. The relationship between the United States and China continues to evolve and will be fundamental to our future strategic circumstances. Territorial disputes between claimants in the East China and South China Seas have created uncertainty and tension in our region. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea continues to be a source of instability. State fragility has helped enable the rise of Daesh (also known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) terrorists in the Middle East, incidents across the world have demonstrated the pervasive nature of the threat of terrorism, and a violation of international law led to the deaths of Australians in the skies over Ukraine.

Yet Defence often isn’t perceived as having much of counter-terrorism role. For example, Allan Behm’s Strategist post on the White Paper said that:

Similarly, terrorism isn’t ultimately a defence matter. It’s evidently a law enforcement and intelligence issue, and some elements of the ADF capability (particularly the precision assault skills of the SAS) are applicable in certain situations.

This is true domestically, but internationally it underplays Defence’s role, which has gone beyond “certain situations” to become almost routine. The Australian Defence Force has directly fought groups like al-Qaeda and IS. The ADF engaged in combat against al-Qaeda during the initial invasion of Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda elements were among the insurgent groups Australia fought in Afghanistan in subsequent years. Recently, the RAAF has carried out air strikes against IS in both Iraq and Syria. While IS should not be seen as purely a terrorist problem, and nor should the insurgency in Afghanistan, this does demonstrate the ADF’s extensive use in operations against proscribed terrorist organisations.

It’s not just direct operations, as the ADF has more commonly played a counter-terrorism role through what’s called ‘building partner capacity’. Much of their role in Afghanistan involved training local forces. Australia has also helped train units of regional militaries, such as in Indonesia and the Philippines, as part of this capacity building effort. The ADF has reportedly assisted the Philippines military with operations against the Abu Sayyaf Group in Mindanao.

This is similar to the Australian Federal Police’s Fighting Terrorism at its Source initiative launched in 2004 following terrorist attacks in Indonesia, such as the Bali (2002), Jakarta (2003) and Australian Embassy (2004) bombings, which helped improve police counter-terrorism skills in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. The ADF’s effort to build partner capacity in several countries across the world has been the Defence equivalent of the AFP’s regional initiative.

Australia’s current role in Iraq is an extension of this effort, and shows how significant Defence’s role is. In early 2015 the government approved “the Building Partner Capacity (BPC) mission comprised of approximately 300 Australian Army personnel which will operate in partnership with 110 New Zealand Defence Force personnel.” Much of this effort has involved training the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service (CTS), which has become one of the most militarily and politically important entities in the country.

Militarily, they are important because they have remained standing while many other units have collapsed, with the result that they are taking on tasks much more ambitious than the activities (such as launching raids and gathering intelligence) they were created for. Counter-terrorism services aren’t usually thought of as firing artillery and seizing cities, but that has become required of the CTS. This Vice video follows members of the CTS during the retaking of Ramadi late last year, a city whose fall to IS in May 2015 represented a major setback .

Politically, the CTS is important because they operate outside of Iraq’s Ministry of Defence and Ministry of the Interior, and have proved controversial within Iraq’s political system. They have operated only under executive authority ever since they were created by the United States after its invasion of Iraq, raising fears they could become the Prime Minister’s personal army. This has not happened – when Nouri al-Maliki was doing everything he could to avoid being deposed as Prime Minister in 2014, the CTS did not come to his aid – but the fears remain. Another reason for the CTS’s political importance is that it acts as a counterweight to the Iranian-backed Shia sectarian militias that work closely with other units of the Iraqi military, which is why the CTS is favoured by Western military forces.

Australia’s Special Operations Task Group, deployed as part of Operation OKRA, has been assisting the CTS. During the Ramadi operation, Australian troops helped direct air strikes and provided remote support to at least one unit within CTS, the 1st Iraqi Special Operations Force Brigade. Australia’s role has been described as vital, but we don’t get to know much about it. The secrecy that covers Australia’s military operations (often excessive secrecy when compared to other Western democracies, which resulted in Australians rarely being able to see their own war in Afghanistan) prevents this.

Important questions are unlikely to be answered. For example, was the recent scaling down of 2nd Commando Regiment’s commitment (which provided the bulk of Australia’s assistance to CTS) a good or bad decision? How effective is Australia’s assistance in the fight against IS, can it be improved, and what would help improve it? How does Australia tackle the human rights problems involved in working with Iraq’s military? With videos and images appearing of CTS units engaging in war crimes, is it still true, as the Defence Department stated early last year, that “no instances of alleged human rights violations have been reported [internally through the ADF] since the Special Operations Task Group started co-operating with the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service”? What impact does Australia’s assistance have on the internal political fighting within Iraq’s security establishment? Does it help counter Iranian influence, and what are the risks involved in that?

These types of questions matter, because we can anticipate that Defence will continue to have a significant counter-terrorism role. The threat isn’t going away. As David Kilcullen rightly pointed out in The Australian:

As I write, Western countries (several, particularly the US, now with severely reduced international credibility) face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region, with a far higher level of geopolitical competi­tion, and a much more severe risk of great-power conflict, than at any time since 9/11.

It isn’t just Islamic State; al-Qa’ida has emerged from its eclipse and is back in the game in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria, Somalia and Yemen. We’re dealing with not one but two global terrorist organisations, each with regional branches, plus a vastly larger radicalised population at home, and a flow of foreign terrorist fighters 10 to 12 times the size of anything seen before. Likewise, last year’s Taliban resurgence shows that as bad as things seem now, they can get much worse if the Afghan drawdown creates the same opportunity for Islamic State next year as the Iraqi drawdown did in 2012.

This will likely mean more military action by Western countries, with Australia participating. The White Paper goes into a few specifics on this: continued participation in international coalitions and building partner capacity efforts, new equipment such as armed unmanned aircraft, as well as light helicopters for special forces. But it’s hard to be optimistic about this reducing the overall threat. Military action has been able to weaken particular groups, and overthrow governments, without undermining the broader global jihadist movement. As Kilcullen points out in the same article, Western wars over the past decade and a half don’t have a good track record:

The first step is to admit that this really is, every bit, the strategic failure it seems to be. For the hard truth is that the events of 2014-2016, including the “Blood Year” that started with the fall of Mosul, represent nothing less than the collapse of Western counterterrorism strategy as we’ve known it since 2001.

After 14 years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, we’re worse off today than before 9/11, with a stronger, more motivated, more dangerous enemy than ever.

Despite this, it’s good that the new Defence White Paper includes this focus on terrorism. Greater recognition of Defence’s role in counter-terrorism should mean it can be more appreciated, but also more scrutinised.

I’ve recently been making notes on the fields of terrorism studies, civil war studies, and social movement studies, looking at assessments from both people within these fields and people outside of them. When looking at the internal assessments of terrorism studies, two things stood out.

• The assessments are usually very negative about the field’s methodological rigour
• They’ve become much more positive in the past five to ten years

I had already been aware of the first point. Terrorism studies has regularly been accused, by its own leading scholars, of poor research quality. As Lisa Stampnitzky has written:

It may not seem surprising that the production of knowledge about such a contentious subject would attract external critiques. What is more deeply puzzling, however, is that some of the harshest and most frequent laments have come from the practitioners of terrorism studies themselves. Terrorism researchers have characterized their field as stagnant, poorly conceptualized, lacking in rigor, and devoid of adequate theory, data, and methods.

However, I hadn’t been aware earlier of the second point, the trend towards a more positive outlook. So this post is to show how internal assessments of terrorism studies have gradually become more optimistic.

Examples of the earlier, strongly negative, assessments are easy to find. Alex P. Schmid and A. J. Jongman famously wrote in 1988 that:

There are probably few areas in the social science literature in which so much is written on the basis of so little research. Perhaps as much as 80 percent of the literature is not research-based in any rigorous sense…

Over fifteen years later, Andrew Silke reviewed the output of two core terrorism journals (Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism) between 1995 and 1999, and concluded that:

Ultimately, terrorism research is not in a healthy state. It exists on a diet of fast food research: quick, cheap, ready-to-hand and nutritionally dubious…. A limited range of methodologies in data gathering, combined with a reluctance to use more rigourous analysis, has left the field with serious deficiencies in many respects. Ultimately the methods used by terrorism researchers are essentially exploratory.

In 2005 John Horgan published a book on the psychology of terrorism, extensively reviewing the literature at the time. He later reflected:

I concluded on a depressing note. The psychology of terrorism, I argued, was at best under-developed, and at worst doomed to the mercy of unrealistic expectations of those who seek quick and simple solutions to the terrorism problem. Asking counterterrorism practitioners to consider contributions from the academic literature on terrorism was, at best, a half-hearted recommendation. Yes, there was a lot of quality research out there, but the unending torrent of drivel made it ever more impossible to keep oneself afloat.

But recently there has been a shift. Within the past five to ten years, the internal assessments have become more optimistic. The same scholars who issued such damning critiques have found considerable improvement.

For example, Alex P. Schmid’s most recent review of the literature argued that:

Looking back over four decades of terrorism research, one cannot fail to see that, next to much pretentious nonsense, a fairly solid body of consolidated knowledge has emerged. In fact, Terrorism Studies has never been in better shape than now…. Terrorism Studies — despite many shortcomings — has matured.

Silke’s most recent review, covering two core journals from 1990 to 2007, also found reasons for optimism. He argued that:

There are signs that research published in recent years is less opinion-based and more rigorous in methodology and analysis…. The use of inferential statistics on terrorism data in particular has nearly quadrupled since 9/11, a trend which can only help improve the reliability and validity of the conclusions being reached by researchers.

He more recently suggested, along with co-author Jennifer Schmidt-Petersen, that terrorism studies was experiencing its golden age:

Indeed, far from being stagnant or moribund, terrorism studies is arguably enjoying a golden age. High impact articles are appearing at a rate never before seen, and the core knowledge of the area is shifting and coalescing around new research and theories.

John Horgan’s 2014 update of his 2005 study also noted the field’s improvement:

So what has changed? In the intervening 8 years, there is much to commend. For a start, the field is no longer dominated by the small handful of researchers who traditionally characterized what is now commonly known as ‘terrorism studies’ (just don’t call it a discipline). Fortunately, the increase in interest from the social and behavioral sciences has also mirrored an increase in solid, quality research output. In fact the creep of systematic, interdisciplinary research on terrorist behavior has meant that it is certainly getting easier to distinguish opinion from analysis, and snake-oil conjecture from analysis that is informed by empirical evidence.

Similarly, Peter Neumann and Scott Kleinmann recently examined the rigour of ‘radicalisation research’, which can be considered a subset of terrorism research. Their findings were also positive:

Overall, the results are not as damning as one might have expected based on Silke’s and Schmid and Jongman’s earlier surveys of the terrorism studies literature. It would not be justified, therefore, to say, as Schmid and Jongman did in 1983, that the entire field is “impressionistic, anecdotal, [and] superficial.” On the contrary, there is much to be encouraged by, not least the fact that more than half of the items in our sample scored “high” in relation to either empirical or methodological rigor, and more than a quarter (27 percent) did so in both.

They also raise issues with Silke’s critique, arguing that it uses too narrow a definition to determine rigour:

For example, Silke classifies nearly all document-based research as “secondary source,” which effectively dismisses entire academic disciplines and methods—especially historical research—as methodologically and empirically inadequate.

They also question Silke’s emphasis on the use of statistics:

Indeed, for “micro phenomena” such as terrorism and radicalization, the use of qualitative methodologies—such as detailed case studies and narratives—may, in many cases, be more appropriate and produce more valid results than the construction of large—and largely meaningless—datasets. This, of course, is no excuse for laziness and sloppy research, which—disturbingly—could be found in many historical studies in our sample. But it suggests that it would be misleading to believe that quantitative research with large datasets, which—from a strictly methodological point of view—may be cleaner and more rigorous, is necessarily also the kind of research that will produce the most relevant insights about the phenomenon that radicalization research seeks to understand. Given the “micro” nature of the subject, the lower share of studies that draw on large amounts of empirical evidence—and, consequently, the less extensive use of quantitative methods, inferential statistics, etc.—must not necessarily be a cause of concern.

So on the whole, internal assessments of terrorism studies to be more optimistic about the field today than ten or more years ago, and find huge improvement.

This view isn’t universal. Marc Sageman recently argued that the field had stagnated, prompting responses from Max Taylor, Alex P. Schmid, David H. Schanzer, Clark McCauley, Sophia Moskalenko, and Jessica Stern, followed by a rejoinder from Sageman. And all the assessments mentioned in this post still note extensive problems with the field. Peter Neumann and Scott Kleinmann’s assessment ended by noting that:

Yet, despite clusters of excellence, there remains a significant amount of research that fails to meet minimum standards of scholarly work. In most disciplines, having 34 percent of published research that is either methodologically or empirically poor would be considered unacceptable, yet in terrorism studies—and radicalization research more specifically—this state of affairs has been allowed to persist.

This all leaves the question of why, despite improvement, there is plenty of sub-par research. There’s a lot of writing on this,  I recommend three articles in particular.

The first is an external assessment, from the earlier-mentioned Lisa Stampnitzky, who is a sociologist who the studied the field itself. In this article she describes how terrorism studies, rather than functioning as a purely academic field, awkwardly straddles academia, the media and the state. The second is Magnus Ranstorp’s introduction to the book Mapping Terrorism Research, which provides a good outline of the field and some of its problems. The final one is Thomas Hegghammer’s conference paper on the future of terrorism studies, which gives good advice on how current researchers can help progress the field.

I’m re-reading a lot of Fred Halliday’s work (Middle East scholar at LSE until his death in 2010), mainly his collection of openDemocracy essays. One part in this 2007 essay really struck me, when he outlined some long-term consequences from the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

It has already set in train six major processes, which will take years to work themselves through:

1. the wholesale discrediting of the US, its allies, particularly Britain, and any campaign for the promotion of democracy in the Arab world
2. the unleashing across the middle east, and more broadly within the Muslim world, of a revitalised militant Islamism, inspired if not organised by al-Qaida, which has used the Iraq war greatly to strengthen and internationalise its appeal
3. the shattering of the power and authority of the Iraqi state, built by the British and later hardened by the Ba’athists and the fragmentation of Iraq into separate, antagonistic, ethnic and religious zones
4. the explosion, for the first time in modern history, of internecine war between Sunni and Shi’a in Iraq, a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition
5. the alienation of all sectors of Turkish politics from the west and the stimulation of an authoritarian nationalism there of a kind not seen since the 1920s
6. the fomenting, albeit in slow motion and with some constraints, of a new regional rivalry, between two groupings: Iran and its allies (including Syria, Hizbollah and Hamas), versus Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan – a rivalry made all the more ominous and contagious by Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Sadly, this stands up well today.

The most recent Senate Estimates hearings have given us the latest official figures on Australians involved with jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq.

These are:

• 120 Australians are currently fighting or are engaged with terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.
• At  least  32  and  potentially  up  to  42  Australians  are  believed to  have potentially  been  killed  in  the  conflict  to  date.
• Approximately  30  Australians  have  returned  from  the  conflict.
• About  170  people  in  Australia  are  providing  support  to  individuals  and  groups  in  the  Syria  and  Iraq  conflicts through  financing  and  recruitment,  or  are  seeking  to  travel.

(these are direct quotes, from page 121 of this transcript)

The figure of 120 currently over there has been static for months, as has the figure of 30 having returned. But the figure of up to 42 deaths is higher than previously reported. My own count based on public sources is only 27, and it includes a few doubtful ones. So there’s likely far more going on than we can see.

Meanwhile, I’ve had two new articles out. One is this Strategist Post on the Parramatta shooting and counter-terrorism in democracies. Since then, two of the suspects mentioned in it have been charged. The other is this Eureka Street article on the dangers of using schools to address extremism.

Back in 2013 and 2014, I had some involvement with this radicalisation information booklet. The Attorney-General’s Department (AGD) had ultimate editorial control, but it was delivered under contract from Monash, and involved consultations with people from other institutions and some community groups. It was not intended as some sort of spot-the-terrorists guide. Then, this week it was released by the government as part of an extremely worrying announcement that teachers would be encouraged to identify whether students are potential terrorists.

Which was a big surprise.

I’m planning to write about this sometime soon, but not sure when, so this is just a post to flag it. I plan to discuss two issues:

1. Why this apparent idea of encouraging teachers to try to spot early-warning signs of terrorism is a terrible idea. There’s a real risk of Australia going down the UK path and that’s very dangerous. Australian counter-terrorism policy has been heading in a bad direction for some time, and this would likely make things even worse.

2. The big questions this whole thing raises about academic involvement with government initiatives. As readers will know, I’m not opposed at all to engagement between academia and government in the national security space. From 2010 to 2013 I was employed in an ARC Linkage Project at Monash that included AFP, VicPol, Vic DPC and Vic DoJ as partners, a period of my life I’m extremely proud of. Engagement does pose dilemmas (see some interesting discussions here, here, here and here) but can benefit society enormously. However, it’s important to be clear-eyed about the risks involved. With this AGD booklet project, I wasn’t.

More on all this later.

Update 1: I made some changes to this post on 4 October 2015. I initially wrote that the AGD “consulted with several of us at Monash”, but it turns out that wasn’t an accurate description so I’ve rephrased it. I also initially wrote that my involvement was in 2013, but realised that a community consultation I participated in actually happened in 2014, so I had some involvement in both 2013 and 2014. Also in the last sentence of the first paragraph I changed plan to announcement, as what the government announced through the Daily Telegraph is not necessarily the government’s actual plan (judging from media releases and official statements), which is another thing I want to look at in the first piece I’m writing.

A few readers have been asking when the articles are coming out. The first one should hopefully be done soon. The second article will take quite a bit longer, it’s going in some interesting directions, including looking back at academic-government engagement in the Vietnam War and even back to World War Two, and becoming a bigger task than planned. In short: first article shouldn’t take much longer, second one will.

Update 2: The first article is now published.

Operation Kirtling (New South Wales)
No charges

Operation Rathlin (New South Wales)
Hamdi Alqudsi: foreign incursions offences found guilty
Amin Iman Mohamed: foreign incursions offences found guilty

Operation Appleby (New South Wales)
Omarjan Azari: terrorism offences (funding) pleaded guilty, terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare) found guilty
Ali Al-Talebi: terrorism offences (funding) found guilty
Unnamed 24-year old: weapons offences pleaded guilty
Unnamed: drug offences pleaded guilty
Unnamed: weapons offences pleaded guilty
Mohammad Ali Barylei: arrest warrant issued
Unnamed 15-year old: terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare) pleaded guilty
Ibrahim Ghazzawy: terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare) now dropped, terrorism offence (making a document) pleaded guilty
Suleyman Khalid: terrorism offence (possession of documents) and later another terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare), pleaded guilty
Maywand Osman: terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare) now dropped
Jibril Al Maouie: weapons offences and later a terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare) pleaded guilty
Mohamed Al Maouie: terrorism offence (preparation) now dropped, terrorism offence (making a document) pleaded guilty
Ahmed Saiyer Naizmand: terrorism offence (control order breach)
Farhad Said: terrorism offence (preparation) now dropped, terrorism offence (making a document) pleaded guilty

Operation Bolton (Queensland)
Agim Kruezi: terrorism offences (preparation) pleaded guilty, foreign incursions offences, pleaded guilty
Omar Succerieh: terrorism offences (funding) now dropped, foreign incursions offences pleaded guilty
Unnamed 32-year old: proceeds of crime offences now dropped

Operation Duntulm (New South Wales)
Fatima Elomar: foreign incursions offences pleaded guilty
Omar Ammouche: weapons offences pleaded guilty
Wissam Haddad: weapons offences pleaded guilty

Operation Hohensalzburg (Victoria)
Hassan el Sabsabi: terrorism offences (funding) now dropped, foreign incursions offences pleaded guilty

Operation Castrum (New South Wales)
Mohammad Kiad: terrorism offences (preparation) pleaded guilty
Omar Al-Kutobi: terrorism offences (preparation) pleaded guilty

Operation Rising (Victoria)
Sevdet Ramdan Besim: terrorism offences (conspiracy to prepare) pleaded guilty
Harun Causevic: terrorism offences (conspiracy to prepare) now dropped, weapons offences pleaded guilty
Unnamed 18-year old: weapons offences pleaded guilty

Operation Amberd (Victoria)
Unnamed 17-year old: terrorism offence (preparation) pleaded guilty

Another JCTT Operation (Victoria)
Adam Brookman: foreign incursions offence, terrorism offence (providing support)

Another JCTT Operation (Victoria)
Jamie Williams: foreign incursions offence now dropped

Operation Peqin / Strike Force Fellows  (New South Wales, includes Curtis Cheng murder investigation)
Talal Alameddine: weapons offence pleaded guilty, terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare, and membership) now dropped, terrorism offence (possessing a thing) pleaded guilty
Raban Alou: terrorism offence (aid, abet, counsel and procure) pleaded guilty, terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare)pleaded guilty now dropped, firearms offence now dropped
Mustafa Dirani:  organised crime offence (participate in a criminal group), terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare) found guilty
Milad Atai: terrorism offence (funding), terrorism offence (conspiracy to prepare, and membership) pleaded guilty
Unnamed 16-year old: terrorism offence (funding)
Massod Zakaria: firearms offences
Linda Merhi: terrorism offence (funding)

Operation Chillon (New South Wales)
Alo-Bridget Namoa: terrorism offences (possessing documents and collecting a thing),  questioning offence (failing to answer Crime Commission questions) pleaded guilty, terrorism offences (preparation) found guilty
Sameh Bayda: terrorism offence (collecting documents), terrorism offences (preparation) found guilty

Operation Vianden (New South Wales)
Unnamed 16-year old: terrorism offence (preparation) pleaded guilty

Operation Middleham (Victoria)
Musa Cerantonio: foreign incursions offence pleaded guilty
Shayden Thorne: foreign incursions offence pleaded guilty
Kadir Kaya: foreign incursions offence pleaded guilty
Antonio Grenata: foreign incursions offence pleaded guilty
Paul Dacre: foreign incursions offence pleaded guilty
Murat Kaya: foreign incursions offence pleaded guilty

Operation Sanandres (New South Wales)
Tamim Khaja: terrorism offence (preparation) pleaded guilty

Operation Himeji (New South Wales)
Unnamed 17-year old: terrorism offence (preparation) now dropped, telecommunications offence

Another JCTT operation (New South Wales)
Renas Lelikan: terrorism offence (membership)

Operation Fortaleza (Victoria)
Phillip Galea: terrorism offences (documents and preparation)

Operation Tressider (New South Wales, Minto stabbing)
Ihsas Khan: terrorism offence (committing act), attempted murder

Operation Broughton (New South Wales)
Bourhan Hraichie: terrorism offences (preparation, making and delivering a document) pleaded guilty

Operation Restormel (New South Wales)
Unnamed 16-year old: terrorism offences (preparation and membership)found guilty
Unnamed 16-year old: terrorism offences (preparation and membership) hung jury

Another JCCT operation (New South Wales)
Mehmet Biber: foreign incursions offence pleaded guilty
Unnamed 17-year old: foreign incursions offences
Muhammad Abdul-Karim Musleh: foreign incursions offences pleaded guilty
Amin Elmir: foreign incursions offence pleaded guilty

Another JCTT operation (South Australia)
Unnamed 50-year old: terrorism offences (advocating)

Operation Kastelhem (Victoria)
Abdullah Chaarani: terrorism offence (preparation) found guilty, terrorism offences (acts)
Hamza Abbas: terrorism offence (preparation) found guilty
Ahmed Mohamad: terrorism offence (preparation) found guilty, terrorism offences (acts)
Ibrahim Abbas: terrorism offence (preparation) pleaded guilty
Hatim Moukhaiber: terrorism offence (act)

Operation Marksburg (New South Wales)
Haisem Zahab: foreign incursions offences

Another JCTT operation (South Australia)
Zainab Abdirahman-Khalif: terrorism offence (membership) found guilty

Operation Tematin (Victoria, Brighton siege investigation)
Kane John Dalrymple: firearms offences and others
Unnamed 25-year old: firearms offences and others
Unnamed 47-year old: firearms offences and others
Unnamed 36-year old: firearms offences

Another JCTT operation (New South Wales)
Moudasser Taleb: foreign incursions offences

Operation Rosenborg (New South Wales)
Unnamed 18-year old: firearms and drug offences
Unnamed 18-year old: firearms and drug offences

Operation Silves (New South Wales)
Khaled Khayat: terrorism offences (preparation)
Mahmoud Khayat: terrorism offences (preparation)
Khaled Merhi: weapons offence

Another JCTT operation (Victoria)
Isa Kocoglu: foreign incursions offence

Operation San Joes (Victoria)
Ali Khalif Shire Ali: terrorism offences (collecting or making documents, preparation)

Another JCTT operation (New South Wales)
Belal Betka: foreign incursions offence
Ahmad Hawchar: proceeds of crime offence
Unnamed 27-year-old: proceeds of crime offence

Another JCTT operation (Victoria)
Momena Shoma: terrorism offence (act) pleaded guilty

Another JCTT operation (New South Wales)
Nowroz Amin: terrorism offence (preparation), foreign incursions offence, customs offence

Another JCTT operation (Queensland)
Zaid Abdus Samad: foreign incursions offence

Another JCTT operation (New South Wales)
Mohamed Nizamdeen: terrorism offence (possessing a document) now dropped

Operation Donabate (Victoria)
Ertunc Eriklioglu: terrorism offence (preparation)
Samed Eriklioglu: terrorism offence (preparation)
Hanifi Halis: terrorism offence (preparation)

Operation Kozjak (Victoria)
Khaled Temssah: foreign incursions offence

Another JCTT operation (New South Wales)
Isaak el Matari: terrorism offences (preparation and membership)
Radwan Dakkak: terrorism offence (membership)
Ahmed Tebya: fraud offences

If I’ve written “unnamed”, this means that:

1. There has been a suppression order on naming them.
2. I’m guessing there might be a suppression order and playing it safe.
3. Their charges are relatively minor and their names had not been widely splashed throughout the media, so I’ve chosen not to name them because I don’t want to increase the likelihood of “terrorism” appearing when their names are googled. They might simply be trying to get on with their lives.

Update 1: On 14 September 2015 I added that Hassan el Sabsabi’s terrorism charges were dropped. He has pleaded guilty to the foreign incursions charges.

Update 2: On 12 October 2015 I added Wissam Haddad to Operation Duntulm.

Update 3: On 11 December 2015 I added the five new Operation Appleby charges, the three Curtis Cheng related charges, and deleted something from the Operation Appleby bit just in case it could be at odds with a suppression order.

Not being a journalist, I don’t get sent the suppression orders. But if I google a fact that was once widely-reported, and find that the fact is no longer mentioned on any Aus news websites, I assume that a suppression order must have been put in place. Here’s an article on how strange suppression orders can be in the internet age.

Update 4: On 22 March 2016 I added the information for the Ahmed Saiyer Naizmand, Alo-Bridget Namoa, Sameh Bayda and Operation Peqin, added the ages of some of the unnamed, and updated information on verdicts. I plan to double-check some of the Operation Appleby information on guilty pleas later, I’m concerned there might be a couple of errors.

Update 5: Added Operation Vianden on 25 April 2016.

Update 6: Added information for Operation Middleham, another JCTT operation, and updated the Curtis Cheng related information, on 17 May 2016. There are several different operations involved in the Curtis Cheng related arrests, so I’m not sure if I’ve grouped them correctly.

Update 7: Added Farhad Said and Murat Kaya on 30 May 2016.

Update 8: Added “Unnamed 17-year old” on 20 June 2016. Also, a lot of these links have gone dead because the AFP have updated their website. I’ve replaced about a third of them so, using the Wayback Machine.

Update 9: Added that Osman’s terror charges were dropped, and that Besim pleaded guilty, on 30 June 20-16. Also I haven’t replaced most of the broken AFP links yet.

Update 10: Added Renas Lelikan’s charge, and updated the outcomes for Hamdi Alqudsi, Mohammad Kiad and Omar Al-Kutobi, on 28 July 2016.

Update 11: Added the Galea one on 9 August 2016. Annoyingly the press releases don’t announce the names of the JCCT operations as much anymore.

Update 12: Added Ihsas Khan and Bourhan Hraichie on 15 September 2016. Also, about two thirds of the links are fixed now. I suggest everyone uses the Wayback Machine when linking to a government website, otherwise the links go dead all the time.

Update 13: On 14 October 2016 I added the two unnamed 16-year olds charged the day before, added that Namoa had pleaded guilty to the questioning offence, and added the operation names for Sanandres, Himeji and Fortaleza.

Update 14: Updated the information for the Omar Succeriah (terrorism charge dropped, pleaded guilty to incursions) on 24 October 2016.

Update 15: Added the information for Mehmet Biber and his co-accused on 3 November 2016.

Update 16: Added Muhammad Abdul-Karim Musleh, and also changed one “Another JCTT Operation” to Operation Broughton, on 28 November 2016. Also lots of the hyperlinks are still messed up.

Update 17: Added Jamie Williams, Massod Zakaria, Amin Elmir, the unnamed “advocating terrorism” man, the Operation Kastelhom charges, and that Al-Talebi was found guilty, on 26 December 2016.

Update 18: Added the preparatory terrorism offences for Operation Chillon (and updated the operation name) on 8 February 2017.

Update 19: Added Haisem Zahab on 5 March 2017.

Update 20: Added Kane John Dalrymple, the 22-year old South Australian, and Adam Brookman, on 10 June 2017. Also added that Azari pleaded guilty to his funding offences, and the States for each operation.

Update 21: Added the 25-year old, charged as part of the Brighton investigation, on 12 June 2017.

Update 22: Added the third Brighton arrest and Moudasser Taleb on 15 June 2017.

Update 23: Added the fourth Brighton arrest, and updated the information on Raban Alou, on 18 June 2017.

Update 24: Added Operation Rosenborg on 1 July 2017.

Update 25: Added Khaled Mahmoud Khayat and Mahmoud Khayat on 4 August 2017, and will update the Operation Appleby info soon, as six more people have pleaded guilty.

Update 26: Added the operation names for Tressider, Restormel, Tematin, and Silves on 17 October 2017.

Update 27: On 2 February 2018 I added new charges for Ahmed Mohamed and Abdullah Chaarani, added entries for Belal Betka, Ali Khalif Shire Ali, Isa Kocoglu and Hatim Moukhaiber, and added more info on some of the Appleby outcomes.

Update 28: On 20 May 2018 I added Momena Shoma and Linda Merhi, updated some Operation Peqin details, and added Tamim Khaja and Mehmet Biber’s guilty pleas.

Update 29: Added Ahmad Hawchar, an unnamed 27-year-old, and Nowroz Amin on 22 June 2018, along with Agim Kruezi’s guilty plea.

Update 30: On 9 April 2019 I added Zaid Abdus Samad, Mohamed Nizamdeen (who was entirely vindicated), Ertunc Eriklioglu, Samed Eriklioglu, and Hanifi Halis. I also updated many of the outcomes of the prosecutions, but am likely missing a few.

Update 31: On 3 July 2019 I added Khaled Temssah, Isaak el Matari, Radwan Dakkak and Ahmed Tebya. Some of the outcomes of the court cases for earlier entries are still out of date.

A documentary on al-Jazeera today featured the first interview by a Western journalist with a high-ranking member of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. This was the Egyptian-Australian man Mostafa Mohamed Farag, better known as Abu Sulayman al-Muhajir.

Abu Sulayman had become very quiet for the past few months, but has now broken his silence, at least in English-language outlets.

For some background, in 2012 Abu Sulayman was a fringe Islamic preacher in Sydney, who often spoke at al-Risalah Islamic Bookstore and supported the Syrian uprising. By 2014, he was playing a very public and high-level role in Jabhat al-Nusra.

They describe him as a member of their sharia council, and a release by Jabhat al-Nusra named his Twitter account (which had the tagline “Al-Qaeda in Al-Shaam”) as one of their three official accounts. He has appeared in several Jabhat al-Nusra videos, and became their most prominent English speaking member to address the dispute with ISIS.

In one video he stated that he had been appointed to mediate between Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. He may have been one of several mediators appointed by al-Qaeda in 2013, when ISIS was still a part of al-Qaeda but was challenging its authority by asserting control over Jabhat al-Nusra.

To briefly recap that dispute:

The tensions behind the current intra-jihadist turmoil first became public in April 2013. The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), which had formed from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq, had released an audio message asserting authority over Jabhat al-Nusra, which was al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. ISI declared that it had created Jabhat al-Nusra, and that they were unifying under the new name of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

Jabhat al-Nusra refused to concede this, and released an audio message disputing that it was created by the ISI, rejecting the new name and re-affirming allegiance to al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. That led to a situation where ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra were both claiming leadership within Syria.

At first those tensions were held in check, as the groups shared the common enemies of the Assad regime and rival opposition groups. But when Zawahiri made clear (PDF) that he considered Jabhat al-Nusra to be al-Qaeda’s only legitimate representative in Syria, and that ISIS should restrict its activities to Iraq, ISIS began increasingly to reject al-Qaeda’s authority.

ISIS and its supporters argued that ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had never pledged allegiance to Zawahiri; that, as ISIS constituted an Islamic State, it had greater authority than al-Qaeda; and that by ordering ISIS to restrict its activities to Iraq, al-Qaeda was acquiescing to Western-created (Sykes-Picot) borders.

In February 2014, as the dispute continued, Zawahiri publicly disowned ISIS. At this time ISIS was already fighting against other Syrian rebel forces (the Free Syrian Army and the Saudi-backed Islamic Front), and soon was in open violent conflict with Jabhat al-Nusra as well.

ISIS has also been attempting to convince al-Qaeda affiliates and other jihadist groups across the world to switch sides, with some success (see here, here and here). What began as a dispute over authority within Syria has become a struggle for leadership of the entire global jihadist movement.

Following ISIS’ expulsion from al-Qaeda, Abu Sulayman, along with several other jihadist ideologues, publicly called on Ayman al Zawahiri to provide more compelling responses to ISIS’ criticisms. Days later he appeared in a 45-minute Jabhat al-Nusra video, making a detailed condemnation of ISIS and defence of al-Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra. A few days after that video, Abu Sulayman used his Twitter account to condemn the killing of Jabhat al-Nusrah’s leader in Syria’s Idlib province, most likely by ISIS.

However, Abu Sulayman soon adopted a lower profile in the Nusra-ISIS dispute.

In early June, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) announced an “open interview” with Abu Sulayman”. Interested viewers were asked to send in questions, and the conflict with ISIS would presumably have been a popular topic. However, within a few days (roughly around the same time as ISIS seized Mosul) GIMF updated their announcement by adding the statement: “Questions about the conflict between the jihadi groups in Sham is forbidden.”

Following ISIS’ military advancement, the Caliphate declaration, and the US response, few detailed critiques came from Abu Sulayman. He did not appear in further videos, but did condemn ISIS’ Caliphate declaration through Twitter and in late August, al-Nusra released photos of Abu Sulayman outside Aleppo, sitting on sandbags and holding a firearm, describing him as on the “frontlines” against ISIS.

Following US airstrikes in Syria, Abu Sulayman expressed tentative solidarity with ISIS, in the name of uniting against the common enemy. This was consistent with the position taken by various al-Qaeda affiliates, of siding with ISIS against the United States to a degree, but not accepting ISIS’ Caliphate declaration and its claims of authority over other jihadist groups.

On 9 October another two photos were released, purportedly showing Abu Sulayman helping al-Nusra fighters prepare rockets. However this time the photos were claimed to show him fighting not against ISIS but against Syrian government forces.

From that point, he remained mostly quiet, aside from occasional Twitter comments until his account was shut down. But now he’s appearing on al-Jazeera, and becoming forthright again in his criticism of both ISIS and the West and defending al-Nusra/al-Qaeda’s view of the Syrian conflict.

Watch this space.

Today, the Attorney-General George Brandis announced that “the Australian Government is providing nearly $18 million to combat the lies and propaganda terrorist groups are promulgating online to gain support and sympathy from vulnerable young Australians.”

Neil Gaughan, Australia’s top counter-terrorism officer in the Federal Police, spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald about people joining jihadist groups in Syria, and said that “we’re seeing more people go who are, I suppose, cleanskins, that aren’t on anyone’s radar. They’re self-radicalising and deciding to go overseas… We’re seeing young boys radicalised really quickly online and just going.”

These statements interested me because terrorism researchers, including myself, have tended to argue that such fears are overstated.

Governments across the world are highly concerned about people becoming involved in terrorism through online activity. There is a big fear that individuals who weren’t on any intelligence radar will self-radicalise, via the internet, and quickly become willing to engage in violence. However, academic publications often argue that this fear is not well-founded, and that online self-radicalisation rarely happens.

An earlier post, Has online jihadist radicalisation been overhyped? gave several examples of such research. Studies published since then continue to make that argument.

For example, this 2013 Rand report Radicalisation in the digital era: The use of the internet in 15 cases of terrorism and extremism reviewed 150 academic articles on “online radicalisation”, and examined 15 case studies, concluding:

Our research supports the suggestion that the internet may enhance opportunities to become radicalised and provide a greater opportunity than offline interactions to confirm existing beliefs. However, our evidence does not necessarily support the suggestion that the internet accelerates radicalisation or replaces the need for individuals to meet in person during their radicalisation process. Finally, we didn’t find any supporting evidence for the concept of self-radicalisation through the internet.

Similarly, social media is often portrayed as playing a decisive role in luring people to join jihadist groups in Syria. But so far, research suggests that it’s role is overstated.

There is this forthcoming report on foreign fighters from the UK:

The report by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Science (ICSR) – due to be published in the next few weeks – will conclude that the role of the internet and social media is often exaggerated.

Instead, real-world social networks, friendships and small group dynamics are the decisive influence in radicalising young British Muslim men and making them go to Syria, researchers will say.

This CTC Sentinel article on foreign fighters from Germany:

The study also provides additional insight into the radicalization process. Of the individuals assessed, 72 percent had some connection to the Salafist scene from the beginning of the radicalization process. The internet as a sole impetus of radicalization was present in only 13 cases. This data indicate that social contacts are a major factor when it comes to the path of radicalization. The percentage of people for whom offline social contacts played no role fell to 3 percent.[38] The study concludes that the “self-radicalization by internet” hypothesis is undermined by the results. In fact, people who were influenced by the internet were more likely to propagate Salafism publically or were noticed by security services.[39]

The study also contains information on the duration of the radicalization process for 128 persons. Less than half (42 percent) radicalized within 12 months. In only 12 cases do we see three months or fewer between radicalization and traveling to Syria. However, while the majority of cases exceeded 12 months, the average has fallen from 3.3 years to 1.2 years since the war in Syria started. The percentage of those who have been radicalized within a year prior to their leaving has risen from 25 to 50 percent.[40] The internet had no apparent influence on the speed of the radicalization process.[41]

This speech by Sidney Jones on foreign fighter from Indonesia, which would be based on research by IPAC:

Despite ISIS’ sophisticated propaganda campaign on social media, most Indonesians who have joined appear to have had existing links to radical groups or were friends with those who did—they were not ‘self-radicalized’ through the Internet. This has not been for lack of enthusiasm in the broader Muslim activist community, but probably has more to do with the fact that established groups have the networks to facilitate travel.

So what explains the gap between academic and practitioner perceptions? A few possibilities are:

1. The academics are wrong. Perhaps, lacking access to the information intelligence services have, academics don’t see the many cases of online self-radicalisation occurring and just assume it’s not happening. Or the academics are relying so much on past incidents, which are easier to research, that they aren’t seeing a substantive shift that has occurred more recently. Or academics are so committed to debunking what they perceive to be conventional wisdom, they don’t give the other side a fair hearing.

2. The security officials are wrong. Perhaps, focused on pressing cases, they don’t get the time to look holistically, weigh up the different factors involved in various incidents, and question their own assumptions. Or they tend to see engagement with online extremist material as sufficient evidence of a terrorist threat in itself (such as in the UK where people are jailed for downloading Inspire magazine, regardless of any intent to to act).

3. Both are right, and it is just a difference in emphasis. Perhaps academics are right that online activity rarely radicalises people to the point of terrorism by itself, so cases of “self-radicalisation” are rare, but police are greatly concerned about those rare cases because they are so much harder to identify and prevent.

I don’t have an answer, this is something I’m looking forward to doing some research on in the future.

Instead of an answer, I will leave you with these talks by Maura Conway and Thomas Hegghammer, about the limits of current research into the role of online activity in terrorism.