RAN C&N Papers

Over the course of the previous years, counterterrorism has focused more on anticipating the threat of terrorism.

On 9 March 2019, a 28-year-old Australian white supremacist murdered 51 people during Friday prayers at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch. This was the deadliest mass shooting in the history of New Zealand and was carried out by a “lone actor”.

In recent years, particularly since the 2019 live streamed attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, video games, gamer communities, and online platforms made for gaming and related activities, have moved to the center of attention of policy, practice, and academia working on preventing...

Humour has become a central weapon of extremist movements to subvert open societies and to lower the threshold towards violence. Especially within the context of a recent wave of far-right terrorist attacks, we witness “playful” ways in communicating racist ideologies.

The incel phenomenon is being studied more and more, from a P/CVE perspective as well. As there are links between certain parts of the incel movement to (other) types of extremism, it is important to try to understand what is going on in this mostly online world.

This is a specialised overview paper on the key themes of the RAN Communication & Narratives (C&N) Working Group in the past 10 years.

This paper first discusses the threats regarding grooming tactics on video gaming and video gaming adjacent platforms by providing background information on different models of grooming that were shared during the meeting.

Conspiracy theories are morality tales based on archetypal narratives about right versus wrong, good versus evil. Providing “black and white” world views, they foster societal divisions between in-groups and out-groups by exacerbating intolerance against “the other” and delegitimising different...

This paper will first describe what challenges have been discussed from different perspectives shared. In the second part, recommendations for both practitioners and policymakers are presented.