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During the summer 2026, Europol and the Spanish agency CITCO organised an initiative to disrupt the Com online ecosystem and limit the spread of material related to it. It resulted in the identification of over 4000 URL’s that included such material. This was one of the many interventions against the Com that have been taken by authorities […]
The British singer Morrissey, whose work returns obsessively to the theme of loneliness, once described its destructive potential in strikingly existential terms: „Nothing fortified me, and simple loneliness all but destroyed me, yet I felt swamped by the belief that life must mean something – otherwise why was it there? Why was anything anything??” (Morrissey 2013: […]
For most of us, it seems difficult to understand why some individuals are drawn to radical groups. Scholars from a range of academic disciplines have attempted to explain this phenomenon. One line of reasoning emphasises that individuals who experience injustice are more open to radicalisation. Another highlights the importance of social networks, suggesting that people […]
Welcome to the second 2026 edition of our newsletter! For this penultimate issue, we decided to take a self-reflective look back at the past three years. To do so, we asked our doctoral candidates to share their experiences of the doctoral journey: How did they perceive the process of their doctoral projects? What were some […]
Abstract This article interrogates how “right-wing extremism” is problematised in German federal-level policies to prevent and counter violent extremism (P/CVE). While scholarship has critiqued European P/CVE for its disproportionate focus on “Islamist extremism” and its “blind spot” regarding “right-wing extremism”, comparatively little work has examined how the latter is problematised once it…
Since the early days of research on violent extremism back in the 1970s and even earlier, one of the main research questions has been why people become extremists or terrorists. However, the flip side of the question was not asked: why and how do violent extremists quit? For a long time, it was taken for […]
Welcome to the first 2026 edition of our newsletter! We have just returned from our last official consortium meeting in Cluj-Napoca (March 23-26) and are excited to share new blog posts and updates from our doctoral candidates. Along with news from the beginning of the year, we continue giving you a glimpse into our doctoral […]
Editor note: This blog post was written by Anna Thaler, student assistant to the Vortex doctoral candidates Lotta Rahlf and Laura Stritzke, who provided conceptual and editorial input. The role of mental health in radicalisation is repeatedly discussed not only in the media but also in professional fields related to violent extremism and its prevention […]
As already underlined on VORTEX blog, radicalisation has become a focal point, with a plethora of media and academic writings on the subject. Many researchers have already pointed out the field’s theoretical and empirical (Dawson, 2019; Nilsson, 2018; Sageman, 2018) shortcomings. Of course, much contemporary research has begun to address these issues (Robert and Kaya, […]
Acts of violence by non-state actors prompt questions of motive and their institutional classification. As such occurrences become public, they turn into matters of societal concern, taken up by the media and political actors. On the one hand, the classification of motives is often shaped by political worldviews, group identities, and prevailing narratives. Ideological motives […]
