Dr. Elizabeth Pearson
Dr Elizabeth Pearson is a Lecturer in Criminology at Royal Holloway, University of London, based within the Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre. Elizabeth specialises in gender, extremism and countering extremism and was previously part of the team at the Cyber Threats Research Centre (CYTREC) at Swansea University. Her ESRC-funded Ph.D. was awarded by King’s College London and focused on masculinities and radical right and Islamist activism in the UK. She has also written on gender and the Jihadist group Boko Haram. Elizabeth is an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and author of the new book (2021) “Countering Violent Extremism: Making Gender Matter”, along with Emily Winterbotham and Dr Katherine Brown. Before academia Elizabeth spent more than fifteen years with BBC radio where she worked in production, reporting and feature-making, mainly for BBC Radio Four.
This paper nuances existing understandings of terrorists’ motivations by uncovering the emotional process of ressentiment in the manifestos of three far-right violent extremists. Through the application of Reinhard Wolf’s framework of discourse analysis, it finds that ressentiment plays a significant role in self-legitimating perpetrators’ attacks, though the resented group is different than expected. Surprisingly, the […]
While the Islamic State’s early years after its expansion from Iraq to Syria are generally considered a success, it was also during this period that internal ideological tensions developed within the group. The emerging faction of al-Hazimiyya, named after the Saudi cleric Ahmad al-Hazimi, instigated a power struggle within the group that posed a serious […]
This policy brief discusses the threat of maritime terrorism in the Tri-border area and the weaknesses of the Trilateral Cooperative Arrangement, a trilateral treaty between Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines that was set up to mitigate terrorism in the region. We also highlight the challenges associated with counter-terrorism in the region such as resource allocation […]