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Purpose – This chapter examines how those who study issues related to radicalization and counter-radicalization have recently drawn from the experiences of former extremists to inform our understanding of complex issues in terrorism and extremism studies.

Approach – The authors synthesize the empirical research on radicalization and counter-radicalization that incorporates formers in the research designs. In doing so, the authors trace these research trends as they unfold throughout the life-course: (1) extremist precursors; (2) radicalization toward extremist violence; (3) leaving violent extremism; and (4) combating violent extremism.

Findings – While formers have informed our understanding of an array of issues related to radicalization and counter-radicalization, empirical research in this space is in its infancy and requires ongoing analyses.

Value – This chapter provides researchers, practitioners, and policymakers with an in-depth account of how formers have informed radicalization and counter-radicalization research in recent years as well as an overview of some of the key gaps in the empirical literature.

Purpose – To examine how John Stuart Mill’s harm principle can guide debates surrounding definitions of radicalization, extremism, and deradicalization.

Methodology/Approach – This chapter begins by surveying definitional debates in terrorism studies according to three identified binaries: (1) cognitive versus behavioral radicalization; (2) violent extremism versus non-violent extremism; and (3) deradicalization versus disengagement. The author then interprets Mill’s harm principle and assesses which interpretation researchers and policy-makers should favor.

Findings – Applying the harm principle suggests that researchers and policy-makers should prefer behavioral over cognitive radicalization, violent over non-violent extremism, and disengagement over deradicalization. This is because government intervention in people’s lives can be justified to prevent direct risks of harm, but not to change beliefs that diverge from mainstream society.

Originality/Value – This chapter extends previous work that applied the harm principle to coercive preventive measures in counter-terrorism. It makes an original contribution by applying the principle to definitional debates surrounding radicalization and counter-radicalization. The harm principle provides researchers and policy-makers with a compass to navigate these debates. It offers an analytical method for resolving conceptual confusion.

Purpose – This chapter examines how sentiment analysis and web-crawling technology can be used to conduct large-scale data analyses of extremist content online.

Methods/approach – The authors describe a customized web-crawler that was developed for the purpose of collecting, classifying, and interpreting extremist content online and on a large scale, followed by an overview of a relatively novel machine learning tool, sentiment analysis, which has sparked the interest of some researchers in the field of terrorism and extremism studies. The authors conclude with a discussion of what they believe is the future applicability of sentiment analysis within the online political violence research domain.

Findings – In order to gain a broader understanding of online extremism, or to improve the means by which researchers and practitioners “search for a needle in a haystack,” the authors recommend that social scientists continue to collaborate with computer scientists, combining sentiment analysis software with other classification tools and research methods, as well as validate sentiment analysis programs and adapt sentiment analysis software to new and evolving radical online spaces.

Originality/value – This chapter provides researchers and practitioners who are faced with new challenges in detecting extremist content online with insights regarding the applicability of a specific set of machine learning techniques and research methods to conduct large-scale data analyses in the field of terrorism and extremism studies.

This chapter draws upon empirical data collected with former violent extremists in the UK to address the phenomenological attractions of engaging in terrorism. We argue that there needs to be more consideration of the attractions of belonging to a terrorist organization and a more thorough appreciation of the experiences that attract people to acts of terrorism. This chapter begins to address these issues by engaging with Jack Katz's (1988) research on the phenomenological foreground, the compelling and seductive qualities of engaging in criminal acts. Katz's highly original and influential research shifts attention away from traditional criminological approaches that emphasize structural background factors such as class, unemployment, gender, poverty, or education. As Katz argues, this structural level of analysis overlooks the subjective phenomenological feelings that accompany criminal behavior. We argue that this is a serious omission as it is precisely the search for thrill, risk, and intense excitement that can serve to motivate further acts of criminality.

Purpose – In order to explore how gender and sexual politics are played out in everyday practice within both the extreme right and jihadi-Salafist movements online, this chapter analyzes the content of two women’s only forums: The Women’s Forum on Stormfront.org and Women Dawah, a Turkish language pro-IS group chat on Telegram.

Methodology – The Women’s Forum and the Women Dawah data sets were analyzed using structural topic modeling to uncover the differences and similarities in salient topics between White Nationalist and Islamic State women-only forums.

Findings – The cross-ideological and multi-linguistic thematic analysis suggests that the safety of online spaces enables women to be more active, and serves digital support network for like-minding individuals. It also highlights that religion and ideology, whilst interwoven throughout posts on both platforms, they were more explicitly discussed within Women Dawah data.

Originality/Value – This research uses a unique data set which was collected over one year to conduct a cross-ideological and multi-linguistic thematic analysis, a relatively uncommon approach.

Purpose – This chapter highlights how counter-radicalization, as a manifestation of diffuse securitizing, impacts the work of Muslim civil society organizations (CSOs) in Canada.

Methodology – The author presents how Muslim communities and their civil society representatives experience and adapt to the pressures from counter-radicalization policies. Data for the analysis are drawn from 16 semi-structured, anonymized interviews with managers and board members of prominent Muslim CSOs that are based in urban centers in Canada with high density of Muslim populations.

Findings – Though counter-radicalization policies are advanced under the rubric of community-orientedness and risk governance, security discourse and practice constructs radicalization as a problem within Muslim communities treating them as suspects who are “potentially radical.” Despite this framing, Muslim CSOs are cooperating with state security agencies in counter-radicalization efforts but are doing so cognizant of the immense power the state exerts over them in such “partnerships.” CSOs are raising questions about the selective nature of security practice which views Muslims as dangerous and violent but fails to fully acknowledge their reality as victims of Islamophobic violence. CSOs are using anti-racism, anti-oppression, and rights-based frames to call out the discriminatory treatment of Muslims under national security.

Originality/Value – The author’s study contributes to a community perspective in counterterrorism and counter-radicalization research that is dominated by analyses from “above.” By sharing the experiences of Canadian Muslim CSOs under counter-radicalization, the author illustrates the practice of “diffuse securitizing” and how it limits the work of civil society in liberal democracies.

In his important text Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil Katz (1988) provides a powerful phenomenological description of the experience of crime, which is ontologically situated within the social world from which it emerges. As such, the experience of crime is viewed as neither the exclusive psychological artifact of a self-enclosed and finished rational actor or as the epiphenomenal conclusion of a process of a structurally imposed determinism (Katz, 1988). From this perspective, the experience of crime emerges from its specific co-constituted encounter with the social world that both constructs and is constructed by this intertwining of self and the world.