Awan to present at the British Academy on 'The Rise of Open Source Jihad: Autodidactic Lone Wolves or Bumbling Ideological Illiterates'

Akil Awan will be speaking at the British Academy conference on:

How Terrorist Groups Learn: Innovation and Adaptation in Political Violence

Thursday 18 & Friday 19 June 2015, 9.30am – 5.00pm; The British Academy, London

Registration and Programme

His paper is titled: The Rise of Open Source Jihad: Autodidactic Lone Wolves or Bumbling Ideological Illiterates. 

Over the last decade, the Internet has become the principal platform for the dissemination and mediation of jihadist culture and ideology, with Jihadist online spaces serving key functions including: news circulation, propaganda dissemination, communication, training provision, and cathartic expression (Awan, 2006). The advent of a newer generation of “web 2.0” spaces, including social networking sites and file-sharing portals, has not only helped to consolidate the ascendancy of jihadist media, but has simultaneously raised the spectre of virtually-mediated self-radicalisation of potential lone-wolf terrorists.

Individuals, with no previous or existing affiliations to terrorist organisations, have to some extent been able to autonomously appropriate both ideology and tradecraft of terrorist groups, through the use of online fora, new media and open source data.  

However, this shift in terrorist learning has not been without consequences for the terrorist groups themselves. The lack of planning, discipline, field-experience, and basic competency displayed by these inept open-source Jihadists, means they often fumble their plans and fall afoul of security and intelligence services. A point made brilliantly by Chris Morris' satirical film Four Lions.

However, in addition to the impact on terrorist learning with respect to tradecraft, there have been even more significant changes on terrorist learning with respect to ideology.

Although Jihadism has spread unimpeded across new media platforms, it has been forced to do so in a somewhat attenuated form; the message itself has been forced to sacrifice some of its coherency and cogency along the way. Indeed, the new-media environment has fundamentally recast the jihadi ideology in the twenty-first century, producing a feeble caricature in its stead in order to retain its relevance to this newer tech-savvy yet ideologically less sophisticated generation of autodidact ‘digital natives’.

O'Loughlin & Awan to speak at Open University's Forum on 'Social Media, Religion and Political Violence'

Ben O'Loughlin and Akil Awan will be participating in The Open University's forum on:

Social Media, Religion and Political Violence, on 15 June 0930-1700.

The event is organised by the Mediating Religion International Network at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at The Open University For further details about the event contact: marie.gillespie@open.ac.uk 

"This forum will examine the role of social media in the online circulation and mobilisation of violent images, narratives and texts by religious groups. It will bring together researchers, policy-makers, religious leaders, activists, NGO workers media analysts and journalists to discuss the relationship between social media, religion, and political violence. We will address issues that are often deemed so highly sensitive that, in themselves, they provoke political and social conflict. We aim to expose common myths and assumptions about the causes of religious violence today. In so doing, we will stress the importance of drawing on historical and comparative perspectives in order to grasp a more accurate picture of contemporary realities.

This forum is timely. The cyclical reproduction and augmentation of insecurities, particularly around Islamist religious violence, and the narrow framing of public and media debate means that core problems are misunderstood or marginalised. The enduring spotlight on Muslim citizens is part of the problem. Our research suggests that there is a lack of understanding between policy-makers, researchers, journalists, religious and community organisations. Joined up thinking and inter-faith co-operation is required if we are to unlock the key to conflict resolution in contemporary multi-faith societies and glean a better understanding of the attractions and motivations underlying religious violence.

The forum will address these issues in a highly interactive way. Researchers and other interested parties will share the latest findings of their research, consider the state of knowledge in the field, identify gaps, exchange knowledge and make recommendations for political, policy and practical action. Researchers, specialists and practitioners of diverse religious or spiritual traditions, as well as those opposed to religion, are invited. A report on the day’s proceedings will be produced with your recommendations and will be circulated to relevant government departments, religious and academic organisations.

Topics for debate include:  How can we explain why some people are attracted to religious extremism and violence? How are public and media debates about religion and violence framed? What role does gender play in these debates? Why are debates about religious violence prone to collapse? How are social media used to motivate or oppose extremist ideologies and religious violence? Do social media help sustain strong extremist political networks or are such affiliations more fragile than is often presumed? What role do sacred texts and images play in decisions to join and remain affiliated to extremist religious groups? How are sacred texts circulated and used in online debates to justify acts of religious violence? How do images of religious violence and of ‘modern martyrdom’ feed extreme forms of religion? In what ways do social media contribute to the branding of religious, political or extremist groups? How could social media and sacred text be used to encourage peace-building, interfaith dialogue or peaceful social change?

This event is invitation only and will be conducted under the Chatham House Rule.

For further details about the event contact: marie.gillespie@open.ac.uk

 

Awan to speak at University of Catania on Foreign Fighters, Social Media and Insecurity Complexes

Akil Awan will be speaking at the 3rd ReSHAPE Workshop on Insecurity Complexes: The Response of the EU and Member States, held at the University of Catania, Sicily, 11-12th June, and organised by the Dept. of Political and Social Science.

Last year, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2178 on Foreign Terrorist Fighters establishing an international legal framework to help prevent the recruitment and transport of would-be foreign fighters from joining terrorist groups. Unsurprising, considering the alarming growth of IS, which has attracted around 22,000 foreign fighters from every corner of the globe, willing to fight and die for its nascent Caliphate.

Many EU countries have scrambled to instate strategies for dealing with not just the recruitment of fighters - both over social media and in the 'real' world, as well as the inevitable influx of returnees once the conflict is over. Fighters returning from the front lines, brutalized by the ravages of war and potentially suffering from PTSD, may prove incapable of easily slipping back into normal society. With the rise of terrorist attacks in France and Belgium by returnee fighters, they may also pose a grave and sustained threat to their own host countries.

Awan's paper will focus on how EU member states might deal with their errant sons, who choose to return home, particularly as the policy options, ranging from removing citizenship to imprisonment, or deradicalization, are unlikely to catch every potential threat. Awan will delineate the contours of the problem and gauges the effectiveness of some of the policy responses on the table, addressing how we might best respond, as it appears the EU will be living with the insecurity complex generated by the 'Returnee Foreign Fighter' phenomenon for many years to come.

The full programme can be seen here

Andrew Chadwick speaking at Admirável Mundo Novo/Brave New World debate in Porto, Portugal

On June 12, Andrew Chadwick will be speaking at a debate event, Admirável Mundo Novo/Brave New World, in Porto, Portgual.

Organized by the Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos the debate will take place at Porto's Casa da Música and features features speakers Evgeny Morozov, Francesca Bria, Mário Campolargo, Tyler Cowen, Ellen Jorgensen, Ana Paiva, David Brin, and Bruce Sterling.

The title of Andrew's talk is "The Digital Republic Didn’t Happen, But the News Isn’t All Bad: New Communicative Resources for Citizen Engagement."

Please visit the event website for further details.

Update, June 23: English language videos of the talks at this event, which had over 1,000 participants, are now online here. Andrew Chadwick's talk was in the session, República Digital. Full slides are here. Portugese versions can be found on the Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos website here.

Tweeting the Olympics - new special section out, open access

Following their major project with BBC World Service during the London 2012 Olympic Games, Marie Gillespie and Ben O'Loughlin have published a set of research articles in the open-access audience research journal Participations. The special section is entitled, 'Tweeting the Olympics: International broadcasting soft power and social media'. It began when Gillespie and O'Loughlin coordinated a team to design Twitter research to evalute how the BBC was engaging audiences during the 2012 Games in Arabic, Russian, Persian and English language services. This evolved into a broader set of studies of television and digital media, of soft power and public diplomacy, and stretched to cover the Sochi 2014 Winter Games. We hope the research will encourage others to think about how they study global media events.

We are delighted that a range of young scholars have published research papers below, including the New Political Communication Unit's Billur Aslan and James Dennis. Thanks to the editor Martin Barker and to Anne Barnsdale, Jemma Ahmed and Mohammad Ziyadah at the BBC. We hope you enjoy the articles.


Gillespie, Marie & Ben O’Loughlin:

‘Editorial Introduction: International news, social media and soft power: The London and Sochi Olympics as global media events’

Burchell, Kenzie & Ben O’Loughlin, Marie Gillespie & Eva Nieto McAvoy:

‘Soft power and its audiences: Tweeting the Olympics from London 2012 to Sochi 2014’

Dennis, James, Marie Gillespie & Ben O’Loughlin:

‘Tweeting the Olympics: Towards a methodological framework for Big Data analysis of audience engagement during global media events’

Procter, Rob, Alex Voss & Ilia Lvov:

‘Audience research and social media data: Opportunities and challenges’

Willis, Alistair, Ali Fisher & Ilia Lvov:

‘Mapping networks of influence: Tracking Twitter conversations through time and space’

Shreim, Nour:

‘Tweeting the Olympics: Transcending national, religious and gender identities on BBC Arabic’

Voss, Alex & Marzieh Asgari-Targhi:

‘The inescapable history and politics of Anglo-Iranian relations: Audience engagement with BBC Persian on social media during the London 2012 Olympics’

Aslan, Billur, James Dennis & Ben O’Loughlin:

‘Balding goes trolling? Cross-media amplification of controversy at the 2012 Olympics’

Aslanyan, Anna & Marie Gillespie:

‘The Russian-language Twittersphere, the BBC World Service and the London Olympics’

Hutchings, Stephen Marie Gillespie, Ilya Yablokov, Ilia Lvov & Alexander Voss:

‘Staging the Sochi Winter Olympics 2014 on Russia Today and BBC World News: From soft power to geopolitical crisis’ 

Burchell, Kenzie: ‘Infiltrating the space, hijacking the platform: Pussy Riot, Sochi protests, and media events’

O'Loughlin and Sennett to keynote Negotiating (In)Visibility conference, Barcelona 4-5 June

The NPCU's Ben O'Loughlin and the LSE/New York University's Richard Sennett are the keynote speakers for the conference Negotiating (In)Visibility: Managing Attention in the Digital Sphere convened by the Blanquerna School of Communication and International Relations, Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona on 4-5 June 2015. The programme is available here. 

Ben's talk is entitled, The Shadow People: The Subject of Global Social Order? He will argue that the idea of 'the people' is being invoked by leaders of technology and foreign ministries at the same historical moment that 'people' are making themselves visible and present via ICT. However, locating who 'the people' are is problematic. What may be happening is that the great powers are using different conceptions of 'the people' strategically to advance their competing visions of global order. The people are not quite in sight - they're a shadow, invoked as a locus of hope or anxiety, or flitting into view during crises. It is in that half-light that political struggle is occurring, the post-Cold War 'great game' that will determine the course of the Twenty-First Century.

 

New Piece in Social Media and Society Manifesto Issue: The Social Media Maneuver

The first issue of Social Media and Society, Zizi Papacharissi’s new journal, has just published. It’s a terrific collection of over 50 short Manifesto pieces written by editorial board members.

As she writes in her editorial, our brief from Zizi for this Manifesto Issue was unusual:

I asked potential contributors to think about what social media means to them, what it should mean, what it could be, and what they do not want to see it become. But beyond that, I left it open for people to be as spontaneous, unorthodox, formal, personal, or scholarly as they wanted to be. I wanted people to write about whatever they may have been yearning to write about but had no previous outlet to do so in—as long as it pertained to the broad topic of social media and society.

My piece in the issue is entitled “The Social Media Maneuver.” Here’s the abstract:

The term “social media” is the product of diverse strategies of discursive colonization and boundary drawing. It is a contested concept, one that implies digital media logics of activism, interactivity, exuberance, community-building, diversity, pluralism, horizontality, and free expression, but also one used by those in the fields of news, entertainment, politics, and commerce, who constantly seek to fix and freeze its understanding in ways that suit their own interests and identities. 

Does the free flow of information harm peace? New from Powers & O'Loughlin

Shawn Powers and Ben O'Loughlin have published a commentary article in Media, War & Conflict entitled The Syrian data glut: Rethinking the role of information in conflict. Based on their recent work on Syria and the potential role of media in conflict resolution, they argue that the free flow of information can in some cases decrease the chances of peace. This contradicts centuries of thought concerning the role of information as leading to cooperation, trust and shared understanding. One potential avenue to improve the prospects of peace may be to map areas where people are getting on - where social relations are stable and markets and infrastructure are functioning. Instead of crisis mapping, why not look through the other end of the telescope and map peace? If we can explain why social relations do continue to function, it may be possible to build out from those areas.

Read the article for free here.

http://mwc.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/12/1750635215584286?papetoc

Awan to speak at CEU Budapest on Charlie Hebdo, Religion, Security and Media Freedom

On Tuesday 19th May Akil Awan will be speaking at the L'après Charlie – Reflecting on Freedom(s), Religion, and Security conference hosted by the School of Public Policy at Central European University, Budapest. Akil will address media freedoms, security, and religious identities in the post-Charlie Hebdo context.

Attendance is free of charge, but participants must register in advance, using the online registration form HERE.

PROGRAM

  • 9.15 – 9.30 Welcoming Remarks
H. E. Mr. Roland Galharague (Ambassador of France to Hungary)
John Shattuck (President and Rector, Professor, Central European University)
Marie-Pierre Granger (Associate Professor, Department of Public Policy, Central European University)
  • 9.30 – 11.15 Discussion Panel 1. Freedom of expression: what to say or not to say?
Moderator: Mathias Möschel (Associate Professor, Department of Legal Studies, Central European University)
Panelists
Stephanie Hennette-Vauchez (Professor, University of Paris-Ouest, Nanterre)
Sejal Parmar (Assistant Professor, Department of Legal Studies, Central European University)
Renáta Uitz (Professor, Head of Legal Studies Department, Central European University)
Simon Rippon (Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy and Philosophy Department, Central European University)
  • 11.45 – 13.15 Discussion Panel 2. Media freedoms: between the state, money and security
Moderator: Ellen Hume (Annenberg Fellow in Civic Media, Center for Media, Data and Society, School of Public Policy, Central European University)
Panelists
Peter Noorlander (Chief Executive Officer, Media Legal Defence Initiative)
Tamás Bodoky (Editor-in-chief, atlatszo.hu)
Kate Coyer (Director of the Civil Society and Technology Project, Center for Media, Data and Society, School of Public Policy, Central European University)
  • 14.15 -15.45 Discussion Panel 3. The role of religion(s): what place for Islam in Europe?
Moderator: Brett Wilson (Assistant Professor, Macalester College; Visiting Research Fellow, School of Public Policy, Central European University)
Panelists
Akil Awan (Associate Professor, Royal Holloway, University of London)
Rüdiger Lohlker (Professor, Oriental Studies Department, University of Vienna)
Nasser Suleiman Gabryel (chargé d’enseignement, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales)
  • 15.45 Concluding Remarks – Lessons from Charlie? Marie-Pierre Granger & Hervé Ferrage (Director, Institut français de Budapest)
The event is held in English.
This event is financially supported by the CEU School of Public Policy, the Center for European Union Research, and the French Institute in Budapest. It is organized within the context of the research activities carried out under the EU-funded bEUcitizen project (FP7 Grant Agreement 320294)