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.
Key ICCT Publications:
Whittaker, J. How do Terrorists use Financial Technologies? Perspective, The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 9 November 2022
This perspective critically examines some challenges posed to the rule of law and human rights by states’ use of data-driven learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) systems for identifying individuals presenting a threat to national security.
This perspective argues that despite the concern from researchers, policymakers, and the media about terrorist’s use of financial technologies, there is little empirical evidence of the adoption of widespread sophisticated financial plots.
This research paper retells the stories of an individual’s journey to join, dwell and fight for ISIS by examining Zafirr Golamaully’s series of blogs called ‘Dusty Feet’.