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.
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 […]