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
Whereas video releases have been central to the Islamic State’s efforts to represent itself to its audiences, an extensive quantitative and qualitative study of these sources over a longer period of time is still lacking. This paper therefore provides an overview and analysis of the entire corpus of official videos released by the Islamic State […]
The former self-declared caliphate of the Islamic State (IS), once the size of Britain, has collapsed. Its attractiveness to the global jihadi movement also became evident in Germany. The German Federal Domestic Intelligence Service (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) estimates that more than 1.050 Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs) have left Germany for Syria and Iraq of whom, to […]
This policy brief examines the role former extremists and former combatants have in countering violent extremism (CVE). ‘The former’ as a special category of actor in CVE activities, including in peacebuilding settings, has gained significant attention in recent years. Various organisations and governments have utilised formers in CVE activities yet it remains unclear if and […]