Joe Whittaker
Joe Whittaker is a Research Fellow at ICCT. He is a joint PhD student at Swansea University in Wales and Leiden University in the Netherlands, and he is also a graduate teaching assistant in the College of Law & Criminology at Swansea. His research is focused on online radicalisation in the ‘Web 2.0’ era, evaluating whether the increased interactivity offered by social media has led to the Internet playing a greater role than previously thought. Joe is also affiliated with the Cyberterrorism Project in Swansea which, like ICCT, is internationally renowned and takes an interdisciplinary approach to different aspects of Terrorism Studies.
Joe has an MA with distinction from the University of Hull, reading International Politics (with a focus towards the Middle East), and a first-class degree also from the University of Hull, reading Politics & Philosophy. Outside of Terrorism Studies, Joe has research interests in political polarisation on social media and heuristic decision making.
Recent cases of attacks by released terrorist prisoners highlight issues around the risk of re-offending posed by former terrorist prisoners. What are the appropriate processes and systems for managing and risk assessing such individuals, and to what extent is rehabilitation possible in the context of terrorist offending? This Policy Brief will explore these and related […]
On May 19th, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced that they were commencing terrorist proceedings related to a February 24 stabbing attack at a massage parlour in Toronto. In doing so, they claimed that this attack—in which an unnamed 17-year-old male killed a woman and injured one other individual—was inspired by what they call ‘Ideologically Motivated Violent […]
In 2013, four young British men from West London travelled to Syria to join ISIS. Dubbed ‘The Beatles’ by their hostages, and subsequently the global media, this British ISIS cell allegedly became responsible for at least twenty-seven beheadings of Western hostages. Six years have since gone by and despite their capture the remaining two members […]