Prof. Stuart Macdonald
Professor Stuart Macdonald studied Law at the Universities of Cambridge (BA) and Southampton (PhD). In 2005, he joined Swansea University, where he was appointed Professor in 2016. He is co-director of the University’s £7.6m EPSRC CHERISH Digital Economy Centre (http://www.cherish-de.uk/) and the multidisciplinary Cyberterrorism Project (http://www.cyberterrorism-project.org/). Macdonald is the author of Text, Cases and Materials on Criminal Law (Pearson, 2015) and co-editor of Terrorists’ Use of the Internet: Assessment and Response (IOS Press, 2017), Violent Extremism Online: New Perspectives on Terrorism and the Internet (Routledge, 2016), Terrorism Online: Politics, Law and Technology (Routledge, 2015) and Cyberterrorism: Understanding, Assessment and Response (Springer, 2014). He has previously received research funding from the British Academy and NATO’s Emerging Security Challenges Division, and has held visiting scholarships at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Université de Grenoble-Alpes, University of Sydney and Columbia University, New York. In 2016/17, he was the holder of a Fulbright Cyber Security Award.
This policy brief provides an overview of the sociological issues underpinning the issues of far right and Islamist reciprocal or cumulative radicalisation in the Western European context. That is, these groups radicalise each other by mutually reinforcing their hate, intolerance, or indignation towards each other. The nature of reciprocal radicalisation between far right and Islamist […]
Writing in 1992, noted terrorism scholar David Rapoport remarked that nearly 90% of terrorist groups lasted less than one year. Subsequent scholarship on terrorist group longevity has similarly noted the short average lifespan of the vast majority of such groups. Why then—more than three decades after it was originally founded—has al-Qaeda been able to enjoy […]
Introduction In the past months, there has been considerable discussion about whether or not foreign fighters and their families currently detained in camps in Syria should be repatriated. An often-heard justification in Western Europe not to opt for repatriation is the fact that prosecution of the adults will often lead to light sentences and thus […]