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.
Introduction Academic research began to focus specifically on terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s, although it would take until the 9/11 attacks before the burgeoning field took on its current form and significantly increased output. From those early days in the mid-to-late twentieth century onwards, terrorism research has had a distinctly applied focus, with a […]
Introduction In Syria and Iraq, the general consensus is that Islamic State (IS) has been militarily defeated, but the terror group is now popping up elsewhere and breathing new life into its global caliphate. In an April 29 video, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi mentioned that pledges of allegiance from the Khorasan region had been […]
In Nigeria, current strategies for the rehabilitation and reintegration of violent extremist offenders—as exemplified by the government-initiated Operation Safe Corridor—have lacked the community support and assistance needed to ensure their success. Through a series of five workshops with traditional and religious leaders and government representatives, conducted across Bauchi and Abuja, as well as an intensive […]