Donald Holbrook
Donald Holbrook is an Associate Fellow at ICCT. He became a lecturer at the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University, UK, in September 2016. Prior to that he was Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St Andrews, which he joined in 2008.
His research has focused mostly on beliefs, ideas, and media in the context of terrorism and political violence, especially on how terrorists interact with published media and social media and how this engagement has changed over time. He has published on a wide variety of topics relating to these themes, including a book, edited volumes, journal articles, as well as reports and other deliverables for counterterrorism practitioners and policymakers. He currently manages a large-scale research project dissecting ways in which individuals involved in terrorism use different types of media, developing case studies and thematic analyses of different ideological milieus (including far-right and Islamist extremism), different types of activity (including domestic terrorism and ‘foreign fighters’) and different organisational contexts (such as groups versus lone actors), as well as comparisons across sections.
A selection of publications can be found on http://lancaster.academia.edu/DonaldHolbrook
During the past five years, a substantial uptick in convictions for extremism-related offenses, coupled with the return of jihadists from the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, drastically increased populations of extremist offenders within the prison systems of most European Union member states. Concurrently, several individuals who adopted violent extremist ideologies during their incarceration for offenses […]
Anjem Choudary, once accused of “poisoning the minds of the vulnerable” was released on licence from Belmarsh prison on Friday, 19 October. Prior to his conviction, Choudary and his extremist groups were thought to have influenced at least 100 people from Britain to pursue terrorist activities. His notoriety at the time was such that he […]
In light of the territorial demise of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria, this report analyses the continued risks posed by IS. Given that IS is playing a long game, the report calls upon policymakers to keep up the counter-terrorism pressure, to sidestep policy fatigue at all costs to avoid undoing years of […]