Fighting Terror

East Africa—a key security partner in the war on terror and a principal engine of economic development on the African continent—is being critically undermined by illicit trade, according to the new report An Unholy Alliance: Links Between Extremism and Illicit Trade in East Africa from the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).  In this 6th episode of the Counter extremism podcast series, Sir Ivor Rober...

Recent events like the storming of the US capitol on the 6th of January involved several far-right groups that used social media to organise, and the spread of various viral conspiracy theories online indicate that the extreme right is particularly agile in the online ecosystem. In this 5th episode of the Counter extremism podcast series, Lucinda Creighton interviewed CEP research analyst Joshua F...

Ensuring security has long been seen as a primarily national competence, but over the years, with the increasing cross-border terrorist menace, the EU has decided to double its efforts and has adopted a more ambitious role in counter-terrorism.  Through a wide range of actions which include numerous pieces of legislation or EU bodies such as Europol or Eurojust that support cross border cooperatio...

We are witnessing more terrorist attacks than ever by offenders previously thought to have been rehabilitated. In this episode we hear from Professor Ian Acheson, former Director of Community Safety with responsibility for running the UK government’s Counter-Terrorism strategy, CONTEST, with the Home Office. In 2015, Ian led an independent review of Islamist extremism in prison and probation servi...

Combating radicalisation at the grassroots level is a fundamental part of all counter-terrorism strategies.  In this episode we are joined by Saad Amrani, the Police Commissioner for the Brussels-Capital Region of Belgium, and Liam Duffy, a UK-based counter-terrorism practitioner to discuss the changes required to effectively combat terrorism in our communities across Europe and beyond, especially...

With the self-regulatory approach of platforms proving ineffective in the fight against extremist content, the European Commission proposed a regulation in 2018 to remove terrorist content online. In this episode we hear from Sir Julian King, the former EU Security Commissioner, who provides us with the competing interests and different perspectives to content moderation from Big Tech, digital rig...